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European Parliament set to end EU-wide daylight savings

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Re: European Parliament set to end EU-wide daylight savings

#81
post #65
post #62

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Getting rid of DST sounds like a good thing. Not messing time is patently good. But a bunch of countries on the western side of the EU ought to be on GMT instead of GMT+1. And appparently a majority of people want to make that worse, by making a permanent switch to GMT+2. This will make for fun winters, with the sun rising long after rush hour. This is stupid.

There is no natural law stipulating when rush hour happens or when buissness hours should be though. Shops will just start to open at 10 instead of 9 and workdays will start at 9 instead of 8 in those areas where this is a problem.

By that argument, the whole world might as well use UTC everywhere. The whole idea of timezones is that local time still has some resemblance to natural time. If we're going to let go of that, I'd rather we just abandon timezones altogether and use UTC everywhere.

Re: European Parliament set to end EU-wide daylight savings

#82
post #62

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Getting rid of DST sounds like a good thing. Not messing time is patently good. But a bunch of countries on the western side of the EU ought to be on GMT instead of GMT+1. And appparently a majority of people want to make that worse, by making a permanent switch to GMT+2. This will make for fun winters, with the sun rising long after rush hour. This is stupid.

Exactly. We talked about this in the Netherlands and permanent +2 for us is too far off. That's St Petersburg natural time, it would mean sunrise at 10am in wintertime. If the Germans will really push for permanent +2 time, then there will be a time zone border between us.

> it would mean sunrise at 10am in wintertime.

Not sure why this is a problem

- Norway

Re: European Parliament set to end EU-wide daylight savings

#83
post #65
post #62

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Getting rid of DST sounds like a good thing. Not messing time is patently good. But a bunch of countries on the western side of the EU ought to be on GMT instead of GMT+1. And appparently a majority of people want to make that worse, by making a permanent switch to GMT+2. This will make for fun winters, with the sun rising long after rush hour. This is stupid.

There is no natural law stipulating when rush hour happens or when buissness hours should be though. Shops will just start to open at 10 instead of 9 and workdays will start at 9 instead of 8 in those areas where this is a problem.

You're forgetting some "laws". Let me list them in order of priority:

1. Business hours must be kept in sync with the important countries next to them. This is important for communications between companies. When business hours are off by 1 hour, there is 1 hour less to communicate with your neighbour countries at business hours. That is 12.5% of the business day you cannot reliably contact another company in another country.

2. The clock must be equal to these important countries to not make mistakes when setting appointments.

3. Business people with kids have to bring their kids to school before business hours start. Schools start before business hours, about 30 minutes up to an hour earlier.

4. Shops open relative to business hours.

The reality is that north-west EU will do whatever Germany does. Germany wants GMT+2. That means that all countries west of Germany that follow Germany will have post 10 o'clock sunrises in winter, 2 hours after people get out to bring their kids to school & go to work.

Re: European Parliament set to end EU-wide daylight savings

#84

I work in energy trading in Europe and for us this is a blessing. Of course we store our time series TZ aware, but many less professional small utilities or other market participants (incl. Grid operators) who e.g. Order power on hourly resolution with tz-unaware excel spreadsheets via email are a nightmare as each participants treatment of double or missing hours is different and requires manual processing.

Why don't you just make a system that the clients must enter data through? Instead of accepting spreadsheets...

But, yes, I can imagine this is a nightmare..

Re: European Parliament set to end EU-wide daylight savings

#85

In before "Let's all switch to UTC to solve this problem once and for all!" Anyway, it's so weird to me that daylight savings is such a new concept, it didn't exist where I was born when I was born, but it feels like a thing that ought to have existed for a hundred years at least. And yet, despite it being so new, people are actually defending it? Mindboggling.

Whenever someone advocates for UTC being the wall clock time all over the world, I think of Jason Mendoza from The Good Place : > Anytime I had a problem and I threw a Molotov cocktail, boom! Right away, I had a different problem!

Another of Jason's (somewhat) related quotes: I want you thinking about dance 24/7. That means every day, you think 20 thoughts about dance for seven minutes.

Re: European Parliament set to end EU-wide daylight savings

#86
post #62

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Getting rid of DST sounds like a good thing. Not messing time is patently good. But a bunch of countries on the western side of the EU ought to be on GMT instead of GMT+1. And appparently a majority of people want to make that worse, by making a permanent switch to GMT+2. This will make for fun winters, with the sun rising long after rush hour. This is stupid.

Maybe some businesses will change opening hours and so rush hour might be more spread with less traffic jams?

Re: European Parliament set to end EU-wide daylight savings

#87
post #84

I work in energy trading in Europe and for us this is a blessing. Of course we store our time series TZ aware, but many less professional small utilities or other market participants (incl. Grid operators) who e.g. Order power on hourly resolution with tz-unaware excel spreadsheets via email are a nightmare as each participants treatment of double or missing hours is different and requires manual processing.

Why don't you just make a system that the clients must enter data through? Instead of accepting spreadsheets... But, yes, I can imagine this is a nightmare..

> Why don't you just make a system that the clients must enter data through? Instead of accepting spreadsheets...

It’s cheap to train people to fill out a spreadsheet. If you force people to use a custom data portal, you’ll likely increase error rates and give your counterparties a reason to prefer other shops.

Re: European Parliament set to end EU-wide daylight savings

#88
post #62

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Getting rid of DST sounds like a good thing. Not messing time is patently good. But a bunch of countries on the western side of the EU ought to be on GMT instead of GMT+1. And appparently a majority of people want to make that worse, by making a permanent switch to GMT+2. This will make for fun winters, with the sun rising long after rush hour. This is stupid.

This will make for fun winters, with the sun rising long after rush hour. This is stupid.

This doesn't matter at all. Really. Folks in northern locations deal with it all the time. The sun rises and sets during rush hour in lots of locations in the world and it doesn't cause things to end.

Re: European Parliament set to end EU-wide daylight savings

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, it gets more confusing for English people who schedule meetings in GMT in the summer and then are an hour late.

It's also a problem for software engineers in the UK, for whom 6 months of the year utc and local time are the same, resulting in people not knowing the difference. In the rest of the world it's bleedin obvious. A downside to inventing time I guess ;)

Yup, on occassion you think you've set up a server correctly but it's actually on local time, only to find everything breaks come the end of March.

Re: European Parliament set to end EU-wide daylight savings

#90
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no natural law stipulating when rush hour happens or when buissness hours should be though. Shops will just start to open at 10 instead of 9 and workdays will start at 9 instead of 8 in those areas where this is a problem.

You're forgetting some "laws". Let me list them in order of priority: 1. Business hours must be kept in sync with the important countries next to them. This is important for communications between companies. When business hours are off by 1 hour, there is 1 hour less to communicate with your neighbour countries at business hours. That is 12.5% of the business day you cannot reliably contact another company in another…

When business hours are off by one hour, there is one hour less to communicate with your neighboring countries during business hours.

If you had an eight-hour work day, a one-hour time offset from a neighboring country would mean you overlap with them for seven hours, and they overlap with you for seven hours. One of you loses an hour off the beginning of your day, and the other loses an hour off the end, but that does not add up to a loss of two hours.

This is especially obvious when you have an eight hour workday with an eight hour time zone offset. That does not mean you have sixteen hours less communication time.

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