Live data from Hacker News

European Parliament set to end EU-wide daylight savings

dw.com

91–100 of 266 posts

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

#91
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.

Currently it is ridiculous that in Spain 10 o'clock in the evening is actually the same that 8 o'clock in Germany.

That is because Germany and Spain share time while being almost two timezones apart.

This was done by Franco to coordinate with Hitler long time ago.

Your definition of "making it worse" is actually making the clock go as it should. That is, the sun is at its zenith at 12 o'clock in the morning. This could be considered a lot of thing , but stupid is not.

Rush hour depends on people, people can change behavior. The sun can not.

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

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

Oh right. I've modified my comment :)

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

#93
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…

[deleted]

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

#94
post #9

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.

We changed our educational grading scale a few years back to make it comparable to the international scale. One of the huge problems was that we had a top-grade for people who went “beyond” expectations for the course. Because “beyond” is up for interpretation, some examiners were more likely to give it than others, but in general it was just extremely hard to earn a top mark and no one really knew what was needed to…

There is an international grading scale?

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

#95
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..

Supply and demand. I would guess the clients can just go "no" and you either loose the electricity they provide or allow spreadsheets.

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

#96
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…

> 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.

As a french I don't see the problem with that, I'd much rather have more sunlight in the evening when I can actually go out and do stuff

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

#97
post #59

All of that because of a stupid survey in which the ones who wanted to abolish daylight saving time were overrepresented because it gave them a platform while the majority who doesn't, didn't bother to make themselves heard. That's not quite Brexit-level but maybe Swiss immigration referendum -stupidity.

The survey was also primarily filled in by Germans. However, most regulation isn't the results of surveys in the first place. The survey might've informed it a bit, but in the end it's just lawmakers making law. It's not like there are absolutely no arguments in favour of this change, or that it's similar in scale to Brexit.

Not similar in scale but in nature. That is: asking a lot of ill-informed people for their opinion or vote (who are most likely absolutely oblivious which consequences that will entail).

Check the case of the Swiss referendum: people got stirred up against immigration, voted against it, suddenly the freedom of movement agreement with the EU got jeopardized and thereby all of the other agreements which were linked by a so-called guillotine clause were in danger of being terminated. (The clause was exactly included to prevent cherry picking later).

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

#98

The graphic would seem to indicate that the UK and Portugal observe a time zone of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC±0). This is nonsense, of course; UTC is not a time zone. I believe the UK observes GMT (UTC±0) and Portugal uses Western European Time (UTC±0). It's also worth looking up the story of why Coordinated Universal Time is abbreviated UTC and not CUT, if you haven't heard it. Time zones are great.

> I believe the UK observes GMT (UTC±0) That's correct, with BST in the Summer. It can get confusing when working with people from different countries who aren't aware of BST and who schedule meetings explicitly in GMT, thinking that it automatically includes daylight saving.

BST is all year, just it is the same as GMT for (roughly) half the year

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

#99
post #81
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.

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.

I actually like this idea. Mostly because it means that my Elite Dangerous time will be the same as my "local time".

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

#100
post #70

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.

Naively I would like to think this was all done using a designed system, but this makes sense. Any documented cases of the lights going out due to an email ending up in the spam folder?

To my knowledge, you won't loose power because your energy provider forgot to buy energy from the market, they still have to pay for it though (probably with late fees).
Post reply on HN