141–150 of 174 posts
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In 2018, the European Parliament voted to get rid of twice a year clock changes. It came after a poll of 4.6 million EU citizens showed strong support for scrapping it. I'm not sure however what's the process of getting this actually implemented.
For context that's a bit over 1% of the total 447 million people who live in the EU
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In 2018, the European Parliament voted to get rid of twice a year clock changes. It came after a poll of 4.6 million EU citizens showed strong support for scrapping it. I'm not sure however what's the process of getting this actually implemented.
I believe it is up to the current (always rotating) President of the Council of the European Union to raise / implement / pass it on to some other instance. https://european-union.europa.eu/institutions-law-budget/ins... Correct me if Im wrong. Its really hard to understand how EU works, even for us on the inside.
Since we all carry veritable supercomputers with GPS in our pockets now, it's the perfect time for everybody to switch [back] to true solar time. Your noon is when the Sun is precisely at its zenith where you are.
Zones are for interoperation. Seriously though, everyone having slightly different individual times could be real confusing. For example, two people, a couple of hundred miles/kilometres apart share a phone call, one of them asks: "What time is the game on?" Also, I am picturing the engineer who work on Google Maps crying at the time adjustments required for traveling east/west on the journey time/arrival time estima…
(And of course railways were the initial reasons we switched away from truly local solar time in the first place.)
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We live on an approximately spherical world, its rotation is not tidal locked to its star, its rotational axis is not perpendicular to its orbital plane, we evolved to synchronize our biological rhythms including our sleep/wake cycle to local sunrise and sunset, we occupy a wide range of latitudes and longitudes, and we need to coordinate activities with people who are far away from us. Switching to worldwide UTC doe…
Not really. It only changes the numbers on a clock. Whether the clock says 1900 or 2300 doesn't inherently need to relate to anything about the rotational axis or sunrise/sunset, latitude, astrological readings of the zodiac, etc. Furthermore, it'd be much easier to coordinate activities with people who are far away from us if you could just say 2300 and they'll know when that is because it's the exact same time for…
Whoever picks 2300 for the coordinated activity still usually needs to know how far east/west the other parties are from them in order to pick a time that they all will be awake, which generally means a time that is during the daytime in their locations, and for many activities also should be a time during normal business hours in each person's location.
Their normal business hours will generally be shifted about one hour for every 15° longitude difference. People will generally prefer normal business hours in a given area to be the same to make it easier to coordinate local events.
And so we still end up with zones based on longitude where within the zone business hours and other periodic daily things are coordinated to fall at the same time, and those times are shifted from those in the adjacent zones.
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For context that's a bit over 1% of the total 447 million people who live in the EU
And it wasn't widely known. I think it was mainly Germans. I would have voted against it.
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I don't think they can do that on their own, can they? There's still an EU wide rule on DST. They never revoked it, AFAIK.
In 2018, the European Parliament voted to get rid of twice a year clock changes. It came after a poll of 4.6 million EU citizens showed strong support for scrapping it. I'm not sure however what's the process of getting this actually implemented.
A poll where something like 2/3rds of the responses came from Germany (where somehow that topic had become a particularly hot issue), even though it only accounted for approximately 1/6th of the EU population pre-Brexit.
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Not really. It only changes the numbers on a clock. Whether the clock says 1900 or 2300 doesn't inherently need to relate to anything about the rotational axis or sunrise/sunset, latitude, astrological readings of the zodiac, etc. Furthermore, it'd be much easier to coordinate activities with people who are far away from us if you could just say 2300 and they'll know when that is because it's the exact same time for…
> Furthermore, it'd be much easier to coordinate activities with people who are far away from us if you could just say 2300 and they'll know when that is because it's the exact same time for them on their clock. Whoever picks 2300 for the coordinated activity still usually needs to know how far east/west the other parties are from them in order to pick a time that they all will be awake, which generally means a time…
This seems like a perfect example of something mostly local. I wouldn't expect US or other news to cover it, it just won't generate revenue for them.
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It is a pedantic difference. While it's technically incorrect to say PST when it's currently PDT, it doesn't inhibit communication. Both parties will understand it to be that "we meeting at 9am, whenever that happens to be for our California staff" as opposed to "we are meeting at 9am PST, even though no one is currently on PST" Even my colleague in Arizona is able to follow this despite them not joining the daylight…
Fyi we ran into an actual real life example of this being a real problem since Arizona doesn't do daylight savings time it can cause miscommunication and people can miss meetings if you put the wrong S vs D. It's even worse when you consider some countries switch over at different times from S to D. Edit Sorry I missed the Arizona part of your comment but there are rare occasions where it can mislead people.
I was just being pedantic about it being pedantic .
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"Any non-internet connected clock (microwaves, cars, toys, $10 alarm clocks, wristwatches, etc) will not be able to respond to these types of changes." My post about 19th C. timezones and train timetables is about this very point. All these independent systems are independent 'timezones' and that's the problem - and it's a fundamental one! First, closed systems are intrinsically subject to drift and will never really…
I think you're mixing up a few different causes and concepts. Wristwatches are generally accurate and can generally be relied upon. It's not practical or reasonable to say they should be a "last ditch resort" simply because they do not handle legislative corner cases. All clocks are approximations to some degree, because time and space are relative. This is true of all systems of measurement in science, in general. I…
I essentially agree with this comment and most of what you've said. No doubt, in hindsight, I could have expressed the matter more clearly and succinctly.
What I should have stressed is that there should be a greater emphasis placed on the formal aspects of the problem (as opposed to day-to-day practicalities).
If from a computer science perspective we had a more clearly defined formalism in respect of time then programmers would be much more careful about time ambiguities and separating internal clock mechanisms from external ones.
I've not given this huge thought but if say computer languages had declarative statements and underlying mechanisms to separate internal and external clocks then some of these problems may be averted. This perhaps could be extended further by having any number of 'clock subsystems' and having a formal mechanism that defines (and or couples) the relationships between them.
If languages made these distinctions in clear, non ambiguous ways then they'd always be at the forefront of programmers' minds even if on most occasions those relationships were set to 1:1.
If one thinks about it this isn't as a preposterous idea as it may seem as the whole notion of relative time naturally falls out of Relativity/Spacetime.
Making computers and compter languages inherently aware of the fact would likely bring benefits. This, no doubt, would add upfront complexity but the payoff would come when dealing with problems of the type we've been discussing here.