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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

#121

Post by lagadu »

henrikschroder wrote: post #16
paulsutter wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If “daylight savings” time is so great, why not keep it all year round? Why change at all?

The rationale for daylight savings in a southern latitude like California is this: People generally wake up, and go to work the first thing in the morning. They would like to travel to work after sunrise. They would also like to maximize the amount of daylight they get to enjoy outside of work. This means that in the summer, all the daylight before waking up is "wasted" so you want to move solar noon forward. But if…

> Spain has a weirdly skewed solar noon anyway...

That's because they're mostly in the wrong timezone, they should be on Western European time like the UK and Portugal. Interestingly enough the reason for that is Hitler :)

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

#122

Post by jimworm »

macca321 wrote: post #78
StavrosK wrote: post #50

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 ;)

The two times a year when you find out which new tests were written to use local time instead of UTC.

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

#123

Post by Faaak »

Tharkun wrote: 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.

Please, in the future use "UTC" and not "GMT". GMT is defined by UTC, but not the other way around ;-)

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

#124

Post by Vinnl »

_Microft wrote: post #97
Vinnl wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not familiar with the Swiss referendum, but Brexit was a case of asking a lot of ill-informed people for their vote and then blindly doing what they said.

I don't think that was the case here; the survey just informed policy, rather than dictate it.

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

#125

Post by Reason077 »

ggm wrote: post #105

A change which may be rational closer to the equator, but which makes less sense in Edinburgh or further north surely?

Tinkering with clocks can't actually extend the length of the day, so it comes down to whether people prefer an extra hour of daylight in the morning, or in the evening.

Personally, I'd much prefer the later. Hopefully, the UK will decide to stay permanently on summer time from 2021.

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

#126

Post by tobyhinloopen »

jcelerier wrote: post #96
tobyhinloopen wrote: post #83

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…

> 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

Maybe you don't, but it really messes with your biological rhythm to get up before dark. If you get up, go to work and start your job all while it's dark outside, it is really hard to get going and not getting depressed in the long term.

Maybe not for you, but for many it will be.

The only daylight people will experience is when they leave their job. That's rough.

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

#127

Post by mrunkel »

apexalpha wrote: post #74
Freak_NL wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opinion here in the Netherlands is divided between a preference for permanent winter time, permanent summer time, or keep changing the clocks twice a year¹. Sunrise at 10:00 in the winter? Fine! That at least gives us some light in the afternoon. 1: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2018/12/19/meeste-nederlanders-wil...

Could be! Permanent summer time has my preference but I honestly don't mind at all if I have light when I get up, but a lot of people seem to want that. Also: permanent darkness rush hours. Nice.

So now you're ok with UTC+2? That's permanent summertime.

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

#128

Post by fyfy18 »

sambucini wrote: post #40

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.

I can imagine. In my country the electricity meters only deal with winter time (UTC+2). Most suppliers have different rates for day and night, so in winter night rates start at 12am and in summer they start at 11pm (or is it the other way around?) so nothing needs to be changed on the meter.

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

#129

Post by Reason077 »

timthorn wrote: post #110
ptah wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

British Standard Time existed all year (~50 years ago) but British Summer Time is defined as "the period beginning at one o'clock, Greenwich mean time, in the morning of the last Sunday in March and ending at one o'clock, Greenwich mean time, in the morning of the last Sunday in October." http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2002/262/article/2/made

This is actually the standardised, Europe-wide definition of summer time, which is followed by all EU nations. Prior to 2002, the UK had various different start and end dates over the years.

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

#130

Post by LoSboccacc »

bonzini wrote: post #109
LoSboccacc wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same for me, if they drop the dst I hope they keep the summer time in Italy, because extended light at evenings is awesome and more useful than extended light when I'm sitting in the office early in the morning

But darkness at 8.30AM is also depressing. For some countries, certainly not all of them, daylight savings time is a blessing and well worth the hassle. Those countries would probably benefit from using standard time and moving everything thirty minutes earlier (effectively a 30 minute off time zone), but it's hard to implement such a sweeping change.

but here's the thing, in winter I still have to go to work in the dark
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