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Spaniards are less productive, constantly tired: Spain is in the wrong time zone

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Spaniards are less productive, constantly tired: Spain is in the wrong time zone

#71

Post by sentenza »

astine wrote: post #47
sker wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also know that folks in most of Latin America, India, Thailand, etc. eat at 8-9pm or so I can only speak for Mexico, but the reason for this is that dinner is not the most important/bigger meal of the day, lunch is. Mexico: medium breakfast, big lunch, small dinner. USA: small breakfast, medium lunch, big dinner. Over here people will just have a sandwich or two for dinner, that's why it doesn't matter if it happ…

Lunch as the primary meal of the day is a staple of Mediterranean cultures. Italy, Spain, Greece, et. al., all have large lunches and small dinners. Latin America is also in many ways a Mediterranean culture so many Latin and Hispanic countries share in that trait.

In every university cantina in Spain you will find a multiple-course lunch. Better yet, (at least in Madrid) every institute has its own cantina, so you can decide between different lunch options: "Wanna go to physics today?", "No, I'll eat at the Ophtamologists".

Re: Spaniards are less productive, constantly tired: Spain is in the wrong time zone

#72

Post by rytis »

astine wrote: post #47
sker wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also know that folks in most of Latin America, India, Thailand, etc. eat at 8-9pm or so I can only speak for Mexico, but the reason for this is that dinner is not the most important/bigger meal of the day, lunch is. Mexico: medium breakfast, big lunch, small dinner. USA: small breakfast, medium lunch, big dinner. Over here people will just have a sandwich or two for dinner, that's why it doesn't matter if it happ…

Lunch as the primary meal of the day is a staple of Mediterranean cultures. Italy, Spain, Greece, et. al., all have large lunches and small dinners. Latin America is also in many ways a Mediterranean culture so many Latin and Hispanic countries share in that trait.

I don't think this is only applicable to Mediterranean cultures. Eastern Europe seems to follow the same medium/large/small pattern as well.

Re: Spaniards are less productive, constantly tired: Spain is in the wrong time zone

#73

Post by abalone »

crazygringo wrote: post #66

What? This doesn't even begin to make sense, just like the article says in the beginning -- Americans are an hour off for the majority of the year, and it doesn't seem to be harming anything. If there's any kind of special Spanish fatigue, I can't believe it has anything to do with their timezone -- it's the entire cultural thing of sleeping/relaxing at siesta, and staying up late. Spaniards don't work late because o…

The siesta does not reduce the number of hours worked in the day. It just shifts them.

If you actually read the article you'd know that the complaint is that they work too much and that it's because their timezone is out of sync with daylight. Which is what distinguishes their situation from ours here with DST -- we're actually better sync'd with daylight because of it.

Re: Spaniards are less productive, constantly tired: Spain is in the wrong time zone

#74

Post by olmo »

donall wrote: post #69

This article ignores the fact that one region in Spain (the Canary Islands) operates on the "correct" time zone. I have lived both in the Canaries and in mainland Spain and I can tell you that there is no appreciable difference in the attitudes described by the article. Spain's problems (if indeed they are problems) are cultural and cannot be attributed to hours of sunlight. This is clearly just an example of the Spa…

Actually Canary Islands is also in the wrong time zone.

Spain should be in 0 (and France, Moroco, Argelia, etc...) just as UK.

Portucal could chose, since it just in the middle, currently is 0.

Canary Islands should go to -1.

http://www.travel.com.hk/region/time_95.jpg

Anyway, I think it will be a good marketing movement for Spain, as I've explained, so we get rid of a little bit of the lazy country fame.

Re: Spaniards are less productive, constantly tired: Spain is in the wrong time zone

#75

Post by Oletros »

crazygringo wrote: post #66

What? This doesn't even begin to make sense, just like the article says in the beginning -- Americans are an hour off for the majority of the year, and it doesn't seem to be harming anything. If there's any kind of special Spanish fatigue, I can't believe it has anything to do with their timezone -- it's the entire cultural thing of sleeping/relaxing at siesta, and staying up late. Spaniards don't work late because o…

> it's the entire cultural thing of sleeping/relaxing at siesta,

I'm Spanish, from Barcelona and I don't know anybody that sleeps or relaxes at "siesta" time. Well, I don't know about siesta time.

> it's the fact that they take a three-hour "lunch"!

Also, I don't know anybody that takes a three hour lunch

Re: Spaniards are less productive, constantly tired: Spain is in the wrong time zone

#76

Post by Oletros »

hnriot wrote: post #63
growupkids wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps that was more of a culture coping mechanism? With an unemployment rate of a staggering 50% for those under 25, and with 68% of them leaving Spain to find work, and 12% overall unemployment for everyone else: that sounds like a lot of people that don't even have a job. That's not a good thing, perhaps the attitude of work to live, as said previously, is more of a coping mechanism. Otherwise, maybe this is at t…

more likely it's the opposite, the reason for the unemployment rates and poor GDP is because of this attitude to work. Its like trying find a ton of explanations for something when the big pink elephant in the room is being ignored. Ever since the British defeated their "invincible" Armada Spain has tried to compete with the rest of Europe and struggled, culminating with the current financial crisis. The time zone no…

> the reason for the unemployment rates and poor GDP is because of this attitude to work.

And exactly what attitude to work have Spaniards?

Re: Spaniards are less productive, constantly tired: Spain is in the wrong time zone

#77

Post by peterjmag »

Funny, I was just thinking about this earlier today. Specifically, I was comparing the sunrise/sunset times for A Coruña, Spain and Niš, Serbia, two cities that share a time zone despite over 1500 miles between them. (I chose these cities because they're at approximately the same latitude near one of the widest points of the CET zone.) Their respective sunrises are a whole two hours apart:

http://www.gaisma.com/en/location/a-coruna.html

http://www.gaisma.com/en/location/nis.html

The Central European time zone could probably use a bit of fragmentation.

A more extreme example is China, which has been "unified" under one single time zone since 1949, despite the fact that the country's over 3000 miles wide. That makes for a four hour difference in sunrises between east and west. Of course, this is a bit problematic for the west:

http://www.wisegeek.org/why-does-china-have-only-one-time-zo...

Re: Spaniards are less productive, constantly tired: Spain is in the wrong time zone

#78

Post by codex »

michas wrote: post #48
codex wrote: post #38

In this age of software and asynchronous communication, there is little reason to have so few time zones, or to have one 1d timezones rather than 2d. It would be nice if local time continuously skewed a few seconds each day (sometime around three a.m. perhaps) such that sunrise was always at seven a.m. Most (non-cave-dwelling) humans evolved to rise with the sun.

Timezones were introduced exactly to prevent the very thing that you propose: need to adjust clocks a few seconds each day. It was just too annoying.

Sure, but software clocks could adjust themselves automatically based on your GPS location. Almost nobody uses a mechanical clock anymore.

Re: Spaniards are less productive, constantly tired: Spain is in the wrong time zone

#79

Post by Oletros »

yebyen wrote: post #60
acchow wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many would rather close shop at 5 or 6 than at 9pm Wait, how does extending lunch by an extra hour push closing time by 3-4 hours?

I guess everyone is slow after a two hour lunch having three or six cervezas for an extra hour or two of the afternoon? I don't know, that's a good question.

> I guess everyone is slow after a two hour lunch having three or six cervezas for an extra hour or two of the afternoon?

What are you talking about?

Re: Spaniards are less productive, constantly tired: Spain is in the wrong time zone

#80

Post by portlandish »

crazygringo wrote: post #66

What? This doesn't even begin to make sense, just like the article says in the beginning -- Americans are an hour off for the majority of the year, and it doesn't seem to be harming anything. If there's any kind of special Spanish fatigue, I can't believe it has anything to do with their timezone -- it's the entire cultural thing of sleeping/relaxing at siesta, and staying up late. Spaniards don't work late because o…

Daylight Savings Time drives me into a borderline suicidal apathy for most of the year. Halloween is the perfect prelude to 6 months of stormy irritability for me, during that miserable span of the year when I wake up in darkness, travel home in darkness, and suffer through my miserable hell of 9-to-5 drudgery bathed in a buzzing, artificial flourescent light.

I am an American who lives his life an hour off for the majority of the year, and I will tell you that it pretty much harms everything, from my point of view. But I just sit here and take it.

You see, that's the thing about the apathy this institutionalized circadian chaos and lack of sunlight induces. It immerses you into a hell you can't be bothered to alleviate yourself from. And when you grow up in public schools which heap layer, upon layer of pointlessness atop your life, this is just one more thing, and at some point you just stop caring and capitulate to the stupidity of TV dinners, 2 liter bottles of soda, and mindless sitcoms that you hate but can't stop watching.

It's a sort of perpetual, depressive cabin fever, where there are never any trees or animals or sky. You're ferried back and forth to your stations in life by automobiles, buses, or underground trains, wondering what happened to the timeless but fleeting enthusiasm of summer, and you stare out the window all day, but you'll never feel enough sunlight and wind on your face at the same time during the winter. In my gut there has always been an undeniable sensation that there's something wrong with that. These compulsory, artificial extremes.

I envy you and your life which is so insulated from this annual exercise in negation.

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