71–80 of 264 posts
Abolishing daylight savings and keeping standard time. If you’re going to abolish it, this is the way. None of this permanent summertime nonsense.
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I don't think it is proposing that. From what I can tell their proposal is a (somewhat awkward) way of saying some countries will stick to their current summer (standard) time next time they switch to it. Other countries will stick with their current winter (DST) time when they next switch to it.
You got the 2 terms mixed up... But yeah, assuming they want to do the magic in September: It would mean for countries where UTC+01:00 (standard time, winter time) makes more sense, they'd move to UTC+01:00 when the next switchover date in September shows up, whereas for countries where UTC+02:00 (daylight savings/summer time) makes more sense, they'd stay on that TZ past the September switchover date. They'd have to…
Every country that is currently UTC+01:00/UTC+02:00 ends up in either UTC+01:00 or UTC+00:00.
Putting Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland (AKA Ireland) on different timezones strikes me as political suicide for anyone proposing it. But otherwise I am warm to the proposal. Some tweaks would make it more practical/politically acceptable (keep Portugal and Ireland on the Western Time Zone, don't split up Greece from the islands).
Yes, that's completely absurd. Ireland is more likely to leave the EU than accept timezone partition.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: switching to UTC+0:30 will put a large number of countries in a common time zone without them deviating from their solar time too much.
Has someone calculated the optimal unique timezone for the EU given population distribution and the goal to minimize the sum product of number of people and solar time difference?
Centers of population of each country: https://cs.baylor.edu/~hamerly/software/europe_population_we...
Country populations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_state_of_the_European_U...
If I've done the math correctly (and this was very quick and dirty) you get something like +0:40 / 10 degrees E, roughly the longitude of Hamburg or Milan. Ultimately there's gridded population data that could be used to get a better answer but I suspect it's in this neighborhood.
We (Europe) shouldn't fragment time zones that much. We (NL) should stay on permanent summer time. Reasons - criminality is lower when there's longer light - earlier darkness leads to more accidents. It's better to have longer darkness after the masses are RESTED (in the morning), opposed to when they're TIRED (in the evening) - longer day-time for office workers, is more productive - shorter time of year that has lo…
I think the easiest way to permanently switch to UTC+1:00 will be to first try UTC+2:00 for a year; few people are going to accept only seeing the first rays of the sun at around 9:50 in winter.
We (Europe) shouldn't fragment time zones that much. We (NL) should stay on permanent summer time. Reasons - criminality is lower when there's longer light - earlier darkness leads to more accidents. It's better to have longer darkness after the masses are RESTED (in the morning), opposed to when they're TIRED (in the evening) - longer day-time for office workers, is more productive - shorter time of year that has lo…
"permanent summer time" yes, and have you checked how does that look like in winter, right? It would mean a sunrise at 9h30 (given today's sunset/sunrise times)
Half of greece having a different timezone that's kind of ridiculous Why don't we reduce working hours to 7 also
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never seen anyone propose moving in the opposite direction of summer time before. That seems needlessly awkward to me.
The point is to correct those locales that have gone way too far in the direction of summer time. Spain in particular is almost 3 hours off of solar time. There's a societal pull in the direction of earlier time, even aside from anything about sunlight. Nobody wants to be "late" compared to their economic neighbors so they gravitate towards earlier time zones. This is correcting for that.
I suppose if you squint right at the western edge in summer time you could get there.
But the prime meridian runs straight through the country. I think a sensible reckoning would say that it's 1 hour off as a baseline and 1 extra hour during summer.
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Ireland and Portugal already are together in this time zone, but the UK is with them, which makes good friday sense. Map of Timezones: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/World_Ti...
It would make sense to have Portgual and Ireland in the Western Europe time zone. They are right over the border from UTC but it makes sense to include them with neighbors. Especialy when they are currently in UTC. It is Spain and France that need to move.
(Technically French law referred to the time as "Paris mean time, retarded by 9 minutes and 21 seconds" - they had thought the Prime Meridian ought to run through Paris rather than London and were sore about losing that.)