EU Backs Ending Daylight Saving Time (theguardian.com) 260
New submitter Zarhan writes: Earlier this summer, European Commission conducted a poll on whether EU citizens would like to abolish adjusting their clocks twice a year. The results are now in: 80% of the respondents want to get rid of the changes every spring and autumn. EU Commission is planning to follow through and abolish the practice. In EU, individual countries decide what timezone they belong in, but the clock adjustment is an EU-level decision. The recommendation for now is to stick to summer time year-round, although individual countries will make those decisions. More from DW. The changes are known to affect sleep patterns and causes loss in productivity and even heart attacks, especially when you lose one hour of sleep during the spring change. "I will recommend to the commission that, if you ask the citizens, then you have to do what the citizens say," said Jean-Claude Juncker, the commission's president. "We will decide on this today, and then it will be the turn of the member states and the European parliament."
well now ... (Score:2, Insightful)
"I will recommend to the commission that, if you ask the citizens, then you have to do what the citizens say," said Jean-Claude Juncker, the commission's president.
Well now, don't be hasty; this is the EU ... that "do what the citizens say" stuff sounds dangerously like democracy or something.
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No need to be concerned, look at the conditional. "If you ask the citizens," this just means that they will not to ask the citizens about anything that isn't trivial.
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He really said that? Wow!
This guy is universally despised, cause after Brexit he said that referenda should never be held because people can't take the right decisions! He truly is the poster boy for undemocratic euro autocrat.
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It was not a referendum.
It was a poll on a web site.
He truly is the poster boy for undemocratic euro autocrat.
Junker got voted into office, what is undemocratic in that?
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He really said that? Wow!
This guy is universally despised, cause after Brexit he said that referenda should never be held because people can't take the right decisions! He truly is the poster boy for undemocratic euro autocrat.
It was a stupid question, if a refendum was to be held, it should have a clear agenda and not a non-binding vague end statement that can only result in the majority not getting what they voted for (left and right wingers voted to leave the EU for different reasons, only one of the sides will get the exit they want)
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There is a difference between asking the population for non binding input on a specific issue, and a binding referendum on something that is essentially a large constitutional change without even saying in advance what exactly you are voting for.
The problem with the brexit referendum was that they only required a simple majority while a normal constitutional change would require a 2/3. And there was no definition of what the desired output was. It was essentially a vote to exit the EU without any plan, and
Re: well now ... (Score:2)
Thanks, I did not know that. Figures.
Using the opportunity to reply to others. It was quite a scandal when he said it. Even moderate autocrats among my peers from both sides of the political axis thought he went too far...
Re: well now ... (Score:2)
By the same token, Churchill was almost always drunk and he did OK.
Democracy? (Score:3, Informative)
stuff sounds dangerously like democracy or something
Rest assured. These polls are not known to the average European citizen. Only lobby groups check them, or mobilize others to check them. At no point was there a referendum or something like that.
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I heard about it somewhere online (possibly slashdot even) and responded.
Re:Democracy? (Score:5, Interesting)
Rest assured. These polls are not known to the average European citizen. Only lobby groups check them, or mobilize others to check them. At no point was there a referendum or something like that.
80% of the votes where from Germany, probably because the main German public news website actually bothered to publish a story on this poll and provided links to the EU website. This is how I learned of it and why I participated.
If I hadn't read the article in the news, I would have had no idea.
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ffs - https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
And it was in the news in every EU country whose news I follow, so that's a fair few, plus social medias.
If you hadn't heard of it, chances are it's because of you.....
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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I'll happily go the Happy Hippie Jesus was a socialist route, if you agree that the highest tax is 10% (the Tithe), which only paid for widows and orphans and Levites (Priestly class) who couldn't own property. Deal?
And leaving parts of your field unharvested so that the poor can take it for food. And giving interest-free loans to the poor, even though you have to forgive the loan after at most 7 years.
Re:well now ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I live in a "socialist" country and things aren't that bad.
The problem with socialism is that at some point, the government will run out of other people's money to spend.
When you run out of good arguments, there is always Thatcher to quote...
Re:well now ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's the Seventeenth Amendment [wikipedia.org]. The Thirteenth abolished slavery.
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The EU commissioners are chosen by the elected governments of each State just like U.S Senators were before the 13th amendment. Any proposed law has to be approved by the EU parliament which is directly elected. The big problem with the EU is that politicians have found it very easy to blame their failures on the "faceless EU technocrats" instead of owning up to them. Italian politicians even blamed the EU for the recent bridge collapse in Genoa
Well exactly like US senators, the majority from each country appoints one.
Re:well now ... (Score:5, Informative)
I think you are confusing Socialism with Communism.
It is an easy mistake to make, because most people are ignorant idiots.
Socialism is in free market economies with democracy. However there are more regulations and wider government funding for public good initiatives.
While Communism is the government having direct control of everyone's lives.
Re:well now ... (Score:4, Funny)
Stop using facts!
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Where did you get that? Communism by definition is the lack of supreme authority and state. The fact that some states where thought of being 'communistic' doesn't make them so, it's oxymoron to be a 'communistic state', it's like a 'humanistic nazism'.
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Without authority, who decides what's getting done ?
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Socialism is in free market economies with democracy. However there are more regulations and wider government funding for public good initiatives.
Listening to the US media this is what I began to think too, but that is not what the word means. Socialism specifically refers to some form of social ownership of the "means of production" [wikipedia.org] and various authors over the last 2 centuries have argued if it should be municipal, or shared by the workers, or various other solutions.
Just this morning I heard a woman called-in to a radio show clarify that the media uses the term Socialism incorrectly, that Socialism means government control of the means of product
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Socialism is in free market economies with democracy. :D
Not necessarily. You seem to mix up "Social Democracies" with Socialism
Most Socialist countries in the eastern block had no free markets but central controlled economies with small free markets attached, e.g. being allowed to bake bread and sell it on their own account. Or buy a calf, raise it and butcher it.
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Last time I checked, the EU was a democracy.
Do you have other facts?
Re:well now ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Because you're not going to be able to mandate shifting the schedule of every person on the continent. Because even if you could legislate that, doing so would have a cost in the millions or billions.
Most people love having the extra daylight at the end of the work day rather than the beginning, even in the winter. So, assuming you have the goal of shifting an hour, what's easier, shift to daylight savings time one summer and never switch back, or redo, reprint, and sort out the logistical nightmare of s
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That is not what permanent Daylight Saving Time means.
For one, Daylight Saving Time (not SavingS) is when clocks move one hour forward, not backward, which means getting up one hour early is in the wrong direction. Daylight Saving Time has people waking up one hour later.
Second, and more importantly, Daylight Saving Time is when an entire geographic region coordinates its entire sociopolitical, economic, and man
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I made an error in my second sentence (I blame GP for mistaking which direction DST runs), though the sense is correct. That sentence should read:
For what it's worth, I think the twice annual shift back and forth for DST should be stopped in favor of keeping DST year round.
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you still sound confused and wrong. Let me help:
DST was invented to have people get up *earlier* during the summer so that they could work *longer hours* during the day. Your corrected sentence says that "[DST] is when clocks move one hour backward"... umm....
DST is the *summer* time, not the *winter* time. The way to remember the clock movements is easy: "spring forward" and "fall back". I'm guessing you got that part right, but at some point confused yourself into twisting DST from being *summer* to being
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Well that's embarrassing. Thank you for the correction. Definitely was confusing DST with setting clock back.
My main point—which lives alongside your comments about the futility of adopting DST year round—is that any shifting of the clock backward or forward is not about individuals waking up earlier or later but about larger geopolitical financial systems synchronizing production.
Florida adopting DST or moving to Atlantic Time is, to my mind, six of one half dozen of the other. Having more dayl
Re:well now ... (Score:4, Informative)
Permanent Daylight savings time is nothing else than moving your time zones by one, or renaming 12 o'clock into 1 o'clock. In the end, it's the same with another name. Why not just get up one hour early? That's exactly what "permanent Daylight savings time" means.
Because I have core hours that I have to be in the office for. So getting up an hour early does not mean I get to go home an hour earlier. It just means I have an extra hour at home before I go to the office. Not the same thing at all when businesses may not be open during that extra hour.
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Why not leave 12 o'clock remain its intended 12 o'clock (lining up roughly to the middle of the day) and adjust business hours so that they are reasonable within that framework if need be? Permanent daylight savings time is like saying, "We screwed up the times when everything should be open, and so we're going to adjust the basis of time-keeping from something simple and straightforward to needlessly complicated because we're fuck-ups."
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Yep, it certainly is easier to redo the business hours for every company in the country, replace the door signs, etc. Also, if the business hours are written into contracts, then the contracts need changing etc.
Or, we can just say that now we are at GMT+3 instead of GMT+2...
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Enough already! Have DST, don't have DST ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Enough already! Have DST, don't have DST ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The endless debate isn't wasting as much time as we've already wasted on my work project, trying to answer the question of "if someone schedules a field test to happen every day, do they mean every 24 hours, or at the same time each day?" We've probably had a half dozen meetings so far to try dealing with timezone and Daylight Saving Time issues.
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..."if someone schedules a field test to happen every day, do they mean every 24 hours, or at the same time each day?" ...
Ask the person specifying "every day" what he or she means by that expression.
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That's who the meetings were with. Clients can't always make up their own minds. They just want it to work.
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...Clients can't always make up their own minds....
Yeah... been there. :(
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Wait until you find out about leap seconds.
It's not like removing DST from one set of countries is going to make date handling any easier.
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Simple solution is just to ignore leap seconds.
Re:Enough already! Have DST, don't have DST ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Noon should align with the position of the sun.
I agree. But as we need to average that out somehow over Europe, I propose Warschau in the east and Paris in the west as the two measuring points. That would mean Berlin time is noon for Europe. Somehow I like that idea.
(Actually I voted keep summer time for ever, because actually I like to sit out in June on a terrace in Paris, sipping a wine and enjoying the aftermath of the sunset, glowing sky, a few high clouds illuminated by the sun "from below". Or having
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Yeah, a friend of mine did that. Having a watch on UTC.
He was always late, regardless if DST or ST ... and he never flew to a country some time zones away, I think some co workers stole his watch ... there was no other way to show him the foolishness of his way.
Oh, he once was on Madeira ... perhaps he realized the foolishness of his way there ... hm. At least he is no longer wearing a watch set to UTC (since a decade).
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Just pick one and stay with it. This endless debate is wasting too much time --- time which could be far better spent trying to understand why we park cars on driveways.
And then we drive cars on parkways! Madness!
Ditch DST, no "permanent" DST (Score:5, Interesting)
As an EU citizen I commented on this and argued for abolishing the DST and keep standard time.
Staying in permanent "summer time" just means you are in another timezone than you claim. So that is plain stupid. Now you don't only have to know which time zone a country is in, you also have to know if they decided to be in permanent summer time or use the normal time associated with the time zone.
So, ditch the DST and let the countries decide what time zone they want to be in. NO SUMMER TIME ALLOWED! The effect is the same but it will be a heck lot easier for travelers or people communicating across time zones.
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Re:Ditch DST, no "permanent" DST (Score:5, Insightful)
Being permanently on summer time means, of course, that Greenwich will never be on Greenwich Mean Time. Something sounds a little wrong with that to me.
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This is an EU thing, not a GB thing. Greenwich won't be affected.
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This is an EU thing, not a GB thing. Greenwich won't be affected.
Except that Northern Ireland is on GB time GMT/BST and presumably the Republic of Ireland would be stuck on BST.
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In the U.S. we deal with this all day, every day, across three time zones. There are a fair number of people crossing the border between Eastern and Central time to go to or from work every day, which would be directly analogous to the Irish situation, but we have the effect magnified and things still more or less function. A one hour offset between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland would be a nuisance but not a major problem in the grand scheme of things, and shouldn't be a high priority in the
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The US is too big for just one timezone. Ireland is not. Surely, it's possible to make things work across timezones, but it's much easier if you don't have to.
Re:Ditch DST, no "permanent" DST (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to be stridently against any form of DST. Then I realised that one thing that being +1 achieves is to move the middle of business hours closer to local solar noon. 09h->17h is offset exactly one hour, add in DST and local 09h is now solar 08h, likewise 17h -> 16h, and you have properly distributed the available daylight either side of the middle of the business hours. Obviously business hours aren't as fixed as this, in the UK often being 09:00->17:30 or even until 18:00, so it's not perfect, but it's a step in the right direction.
And doing this with permanent DST is easier than trying to get all schools and businesses to actually shift their hours around.
And that's why, when I filled in the EU questionnaire, I expressed a preference for what has turned out to be the majority opinion.
For those parts (latitude bands) of the world where DST can possibly make a difference to the amount of daylight at either end of the day there's too little of it in the depths of Winter anyway! Further north than that has too little and this is a change for no good reason, and further south there's no need as they maintain enough daylight hours even in Winter.
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I don't know any country where noon is truly the middle of your day. If you wake up at 7am and go to sleep at 11pm the middle of the day is 3pm. Most people are already living "in a different timezone".
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Then you failed.
The most important country you should have guessed is: UK. GMT is defined by noon being at Greenwich. And from there we derive UTC and from there we derive the times for the rest of the world.
Ah, now I grasp it, "middle of the day", that is of course not the case. But middle of the daylight period, that is.
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Staying in permanent "summer time" just means you are in another timezone than you claim. So that is plain stupid. Now you don't only have to know which time zone a country is in, you also have to know if they decided to be in permanent summer time or use the normal time associated with the time zone.
Don't be stupid. They have names for timezones that basically eliminate all of your complaints. If you're judging this on anything other than how complicated it is to change the clock or what time the sun rises and sets then you're waaaaay overthinking it.
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Staying in permanent "summer time" just means you are in another timezone than you claim. So that is plain stupid. Now you don't only have to know which time zone a country is in, you also have to know if they decided to be in permanent summer time or use the normal time associated with the time zone.
As you've stated, permanent DS
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So, this seems to say that if Germany wants to use HST, it would be okay with you?
Germany using the same timezone as Hawaii seems wrong, somehow....
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I agree. I'm a Brit and although I suspect my opinion will be in the minority, I'd be happy to ditch DST - for GMT all year round. I prefer lighter mornings to wake up to than lighter evenings (evenings are dark, who gives a shit really). GMT+1 in winter will basically mean waking up in the dark which is depressing.
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If everyone gets rid of the time change, then you just figure out which time zone people are in, the same way it is now. I just wish we would get rid of that stupid idea here in the USA as well, because no one actually wants to change the clocks EVER. It just throws everyone off.
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I like having permanent summer time. Around here, that means the sun is at its highest around 14:00, giving a very nice skew of daylight away from the very early morning (when I'm asleep) and towards the evening (where it's useful).
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> Staying in permanent "summer time" just means you are in another timezone than you claim. So that is plain stupid. Now you don't only have to know which time zone a country is in, you also have to know if they decided to be in permanent summer time or use the normal time associated with the time zone
Using the term "to remain in summer time" is easier for normal people to understand than "to recommend each country set their timezone to the offset used in Summer Time."
> So, ditch the DST and let the c
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The poll/vote actually is: abolish DST.
Shift the timezone(s) to summer time.
80% are in favour of that.
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I participated in the poll. The problem with it is that they first asked whether you want to abolish time switching or keep it. Afterwards they asked separately whether you would like to have summer time or winter time if you're against switching. At least that's the poll I've got in early August, maybe they changed it later. That's why they now have the silly, although almost certainly intended result to abolish switching. Which time zone is chosen, however, is left to each country, and it's very likely th
Frankly, I don't care (Score:2)
All DST really changes for me is that I come to work an hour later during Summer.
The Great White North (Score:4, Informative)
Here in Canada there is a push in some regions to abolish daylight saving time. Parts of the country (e.g. Saskatchewan) are already sane about this. Ditto the northeast corner of B.C.
Even at my relatively southerly latitude (49 degrees north) summers are light regardless of our nominal time zone. Winters are dark, again, regardless of our time zone. If we stayed on PST (UTC-8) all year the sun would set at 2030 in the summer. What more do people want? And on PDT all year (UTC-7) the sun would still set at 1700 in December. What good is that? It wouldn't rise until 0900. Ugh.
...laura
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Even at my relatively southerly latitude (49 degrees north) summers are light regardless of our nominal time zone. Winters are dark, again, regardless of our time zone. If we stayed on PST (UTC-8) all year the sun would set at 2030 in the summer. What more do people want? And on PDT all year (UTC-7) the sun would still set at 1700 in December. What good is that? It wouldn't rise until 0900. Ugh.
This. A million times this. Though it does depend a bit on where you are in the time zone on the exact sunrise/set times (not counting shenanigans on the time zone boundaries, it varies by an hour, unsurprisingly). Still, it doesn't change the fact that if you're at a high enough latitude or close enough to the equator, the benefits of DST are, well, dubious at best.
On another note, the idea of using DST all year is really just a way to get people to shift their day by an hour without them realizing it. Tha
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Historically, it was used to conserve coal use (Score:5, Informative)
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Bingo (Score:2)
>"The recommendation for now is to stick to summer time year-round"
BINGO. Nearly all of us want EXACTLY THAT and have for many, many years now. Go on summer time and just LEAVE IT THERE PERMANENTLY. PLEASE DO IT.... then maybe the USA can follow...
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Except those living north of about 45 degrees, sure...
You see, in the summer time, the sun already sets quite late anyways, and DST is not really required to give an extra hour of daylight. While in the winter the does indeed set a lot earlier and an extra hour of daylight at the end of the day could be nice, the sun also rises that much later as well, and any hours you add to the evening take away from the hours of daylight you get in the morning.
And do not fail to consider the well documented health
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>"Except those living north of about 45 degrees, sure... "
Good point. I could definitely see a good argument about northern latitudes using standard time while further south uses summer time. That would still work quite well, as long as it never changes.
>"Noon (12PM) should be in the middle of the day, not an hour before it. Otherwise calling PM at all is a complete misnomer."
Also true :)
But I will take more usable daylight over correctness of noon, anytime. Besides, with the system we have now, "n
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Would you rather take more usable daylight in the evening over the health benefits of having at least some sunshine exposure at the start of each day?
I would suggest that is only because being wrong half of the time is still better than being wrong all of the time. If it is wrong all of the time, and 1PM is defined as the
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If it makes sense, Trump will make sure not to do it. On the plus side, that would be one more good reason to get rid of the orange idiot.
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>"I don't want it! I think we should be on Daylight Savings Time year around. We don't need more light in the evening."
We do in the winter; for many it is already dark, so it doesn't matter much. So I would say most don't need any more light in the morning most of the year, if not all of the year, which is effectively what going to standard time does. In modern times, most people would much rather have more light after work, when we can enjoy and used it. As it is now, I have to get up in the dark and
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DST works well in a narrow band of latitudes; from perhaps the Mason-Dixon line north to about the 50th parallel. If you're in Florida where the day is pretty much the same length year round, or in Alaska where long summer days meet short winter ones, it's not particularly useful.
Where I live (51 N Lat) we get 15 hours of summer sunlight and DST adding an hour to evening sun just means mothers are trying to get their kids to bed as the sun goes down at 11:30 PM instead of 10:30 PM during summer vacation, an
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PLEASE DO IT.... then maybe the USA can follow...
The US following something the EU is doing? You really think that is possible?
I hope so (Score:2)
Abolish Timezones while you are at it. (Score:3)
I don't care if I go to work at 0600 hours or 1700 hours. Timezones are stupid. The military figured this out years ago.
Boondoggle (Score:2, Insightful)
Daylight savings time is a classic government boondoggle: a completely useless (at best) project that only got off the ground because (1) they weren't spending their own time or money on it, so there was nothing to lose, and (2) somebody identified a chance to engineer their own legacy.
Get rid of it. I personally am in favor of staying permanently on standard time, since where I live DST means getting up in the dark and going to bed in the light (which is ass backwards according to human nature).
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The idea was energy savings. So not that useless.
The idea was shops e.g. would switch on the lights in the windows later. However many companies did not bother to change the clocks that control the lights ... so no real saving.
But it is interesting how stupid and brain dead your reasoning is ...
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I live in the Netherlands. It makes sense to be in the same timezone as most of the EU, especially Germany. But that time is off by about 40 minutes. Logically, we should be in GMT, not GMT+1, but that would be extremely impractical. Hopping across the German-Dutch border is extremely frequent, and having to change the clocks all the time would be annoying.
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Problem solved.
Except for the fact that offices with 9-5 schedules in both countries now only have 6 hours of overlap, which makes business much less efficient.
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Why settle for 6 when you can have 8 with only minor disadvantages ? There's a huge amount of trade going between The Netherlands and Germany. Not just trade between the two countries, but also goods transported through them. Having 33% more overlap in business hours is huge.
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Doing it "mentally" is only easy for a person who never did it, or even tried it.
Obviously adding or subtracting a single 1 is easy. However preventing to mix up if you have to add it or subtract it, is for some reason pretty challenging. After all you are used to glance at your watch and figure: I have to go in 30 minutes. While in fact you are already 30 minutes later or have 1:30 hours left till you have to go.
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It would be off for most of the country anyway. You do not want everywhere using Local Solar Time, as we did that in the UK back when railways first became popular and it caused all sorts of timetable problems.
And as I mentioned in another comment, part of the issue is that business hours aren't centred around local solar noon. Being on +1 at least partially corrects this, and is an easier change to get everyone to accept. The alternative is trying to get everyone to open business an hour earlier (and
Re:Kick it while it's down! (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is if you live north of 35 degrees, like most of Europe, it doesn't matter if there is DST or not, there is simply too many hours of daytime in the summer and not enough in the winter.
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I want permanent DST all year long. And I voted for Trump.
Did I just melt your snowflake mind?
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I want permanent DST all year long. And I voted for Trump.
Did I just melt your snowflake mind?
Proof that you can't fix stupid.
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