European Parliament set to end EU-wide daylight savings • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by magduf » Wed, Mar 06, 2019, 3:12 PM UTC

lagadu wrote: post #121

henrikschroder wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Not exactly. The reason is themselves. They chose to have a dictator, and that dictator changed the timezone to match Hitler-time way back in the 1940s. Then they just never changed it back, even though their dictator finally died over 40 years ago. So they've made conscious choices to stay in the wrong timezone for almost 80 years now.

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

#202

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Mar 06, 2019, 3:13 PM UTC

rsik wrote: post #183

thomasedwards wrote: post #153

So many people, including a lot of comments here, seem to think that it’s designed around the winter. It’s not, it’s to move an hour of sunlight from the start of the day (say, 4am) to the end of the day (say, 9pm) so that you use less energy in the summer (hence the ‘savings’), and then you can enjoy that rather than being asleep. Moving to summer time year-round means that the mornings in the winter will be darker.…

So just change the hours you work during the Winter! Why do you have to modify the actual clock that everyone else uses to do that?

> So just change the hours you work during the Winter

Only the petit bourgeoisie (and not all of them, because often the capital and labor portion of their support is separated in modern capitalist/mixed economies) both labor and have even the theoretical ability to direct the hours of the labor, and even there there is a coordination problem since there is value in aligning core work hours with others. In any case, because consistent hours are, ceteris paribus, slightly cheaper, rationally it will be more common for work not to move without mandated clock shifts.

EDIT: To clarify, more common than is the case with clock shifts, not more common than work having seasonal shifts. The latter may also be the case, but is not the conclusion just from the being a marginal cost that doesn't exist when clock shifts are mandated.

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

#203

Post by magduf » Wed, Mar 06, 2019, 3:17 PM UTC

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #83

tirpen wrote: 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…

>1. Business hours must be kept in sync with the important countries next to them. This is important for communications between companies.

I'm going to echo another responder here: this is total BS. Here in America, it's completely routine for companies on opposite coasts to do business with each other, and there's a 3-hour time difference year-round. If we can handle that, surely Europeans can handle a 1-hour difference.

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

#204

Post by devdas » Wed, Mar 06, 2019, 3:20 PM UTC

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 ;)

A downside to believing that you invented the concept of measuring time.

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

#205

Post by bonzini » Wed, Mar 06, 2019, 3:22 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #29

bonzini wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If schools also do not switch biannually (which of course they won't) that simply does not work for families with children.

Are schools also 09:00-17:00 where you live? Where I grew up they were 09:00-15:30. Not exactly good for commmunters anyway. Why would shifting things by an hour make much difference, when alternate arrangements are needed regardless?

Here elementary schools are 8:30-16:30 while middle schools are 8:00-13:00 (but they can stay at home alone in the afternoon). On the other hand working hours are usually more like 9:30-18:00 (8 hours plus lunch break). Dinner starts around 19 or even 19:30.

It's common to have parents take the kids to school and grandparents or neighbors pick them up, and also the schools open earlier than the time classes start. However, if the parents were to start working at 8:30 with a 45 minutes commute, they still wouldn't have time to take the kids to school and then reach their workplace in time.

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

#206

Post by anticensor » Wed, Mar 06, 2019, 3:23 PM UTC

wazoox wrote: post #186

spiderfarmer wrote: post #174

Lets also try and spread working times from (mostly) 9-5 to 6-2, 7-3, 8-4, 9-5 and 10-6 so we can solve the traffic congestion problem, all while enabling people to work when they work best.

You forgot my favourite time slots, 11-7, 12-8 and 1-9 :)

Afternoon or night?

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

#207

Post by bonzini » Wed, Mar 06, 2019, 3:25 PM UTC

LoSboccacc wrote: post #130

bonzini wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What time do you leave home in the winter? Both me and my wife leave at 8:15 AM, and it's already light in Milan.

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

#208

Post by anticensor » Wed, Mar 06, 2019, 3:32 PM UTC

freecodyx wrote: post #179

Here in Morocco, it was made permanent starting this year, so instead of being GMT we are GMT+1 all year round, Except, this decision was made brutally without any prior discussion or vote,

Same in Turkey.

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

#209

Post by rsik » Wed, Mar 06, 2019, 3:33 PM UTC

rsik wrote: post #197

athenot wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be great but convincing School Boards of that would be a non-trivial task.

DST causes trauma for people with bipolar disorder, heart attacks go up, etc. Also, on a selfish note, it's irritating to program around. DST is a legislative solution to the problem of getting everyone to change scheduling. So why not use legislation to get those school boards to change scheduling directly?

downvotes instead of rational arguments? On HN? Either pigs are flying or it's Wednesday again.

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

#210

Post by mac01021 » Wed, Mar 06, 2019, 3:34 PM UTC

function_seven wrote: post #5

henrikschroder wrote: post #4

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!

By why is UTC a Molotov cocktail?