Summary
Most European countries moved clocks forward one hour on Sunday, marking the start of daylight saving time (DST), a practice increasingly criticized.
Originally introduced during World War I to conserve energy, DST returned during the 1970s oil crisis and now shifts Central European Time to Central European Summer Time.
Despite a 2018 EU consultation where 84% of nearly 4 million respondents supported abolishing DST, implementation stalled due to member state disagreement.
Poland, currently holding the EU presidency, plans informal consultations to revisit the issue amid broader geopolitical priorities.
I like DST. I like having sunlight later into the evening during the summer.
The objection isn’t to DST, it’s to switching back and forth. Just pick one and stick with it.
Yeah, as someone with a circadian rythm disorder DST time changes kinda destroy me. Every single year, twice a year.
I’m hoping the US manages to get rid of it, we had a bill to do just that get unexpectedly far, before stalling out I think :/
Sending love from the US, y’all take care :)
Split the difference at 30 minutes, and call it a day!
½ an hour is a very short day
No, the objection is to DST. Noon should be approximately at noon.
I’d take permanent DST over the current retarded shit show though.
Noon should be as close to midday as possible but never before midday.
On standard time, on the west end of the time zones, midday occurs at or before 11:30 AM. That is ridiculous.
I’m okay with that plan, although I’m curious why you find it so important.
In any case that’s a problem with the layout of time zones not with DST.
For most of the past 110 years or so since DST was implemented, for 3/4 of the year, we have had solar noon occurring at 13:00 in the center of each time zone. You’re already living with it most of the time. We’ve established school schedules, work schedules, industrial schedules, laws (such as curfews, noise ordinances, parking enforcement) and all sorts of infrastructure on the idea that for 3/4 of the year, there will be one more hour of daylight after 12:00pm than there is before 12:00 pm.
Either approach we take, we are going to upend a wide variety of laws, rules, practices, and customs that have been established over the past century. Adopting legacy standard time is going to impact events over 3/4 of the year; adopting permanent DST is going to impact events over 1/4 of the year.
We should select the system that minimizes disruption. That system is DST.
I think most people just don’t like the time changes twice a year. Permanent standard time or summer time doesn’t matter as much to me, just pick one and stay with it.
Well if you pick permanent summer time it’s gonna be light hella late in winter so you might not know it but it might matter much to you. Although I don’t know you and maybe it truly wouldnt matter to you
So, you’re saying that there might actually be some daylight left to do something after the work day / school day is over?
The day is much shorter in the middle winter, so it never was about daylight being left after work. I agree if there is less than 8 hours of daylight and you work 8 hours or more in a factory or an office it doesn’t matter much which hours are dark and which aren’t.
Just… wake up earlier?
I’m with that guy, I get out of work at a set time I like to have some daylight after work. Doesn’t matter what time I wake up, I don’t wanna do things before work I just like to see the sun after work it gives me something to look forward to.
So… change your working hours?
Oh shit this is a good idea. let me just tell my boss to change the hours of the business real quick so I can go hiking after work. Thanks!
I did this for a while but my boss said it looked bad that I leave before everyone else and wasn’t fair to customer-facing peers that had to be there certain hours…
You’re telling them to “change” their own working hours in a way that would eliminate the effects of the time change. You’re telling them to set their hours as if the time change didn’t occur.
You could just stop automatically changing their hours twice a year.
The clocks are fine for 9 months out of the year. All of the problems occur in the remaining three months, and only occur because we arbitrarily change everyone’s working hours with no good reason. Stop pushing everyone to a bullshit “winter” schedule for three months, when the normal summer schedule works just fine.
It’s the summer hours that are abnormal though…
Depends what you mean by “abnormal”.
It is not “normal” for solar noon to occur ante meridiem in some places, and post meridiem in others. Yet, legacy standard time requires this: the west end of the time zone experiences solar noon at 11:30 in the morning, or even earlier in some cases.
Improved time has the entire time zone experience midday in the PM.
We use improved time for 3/4 of the year; its hard to say that the more common time system is the “abnormal” one. The legacy time system might once have been considered a “standard”, but so were 8-track tapes at one point. (But that’s the wrong metaphor here… “Standard time” went out of fashion before reel-to-reel, before electrically-driven record players. The last time “standard time” was in common use was shortly before broadcast radio was developed. State-of-the-art audio playback was replacing hand-cranked record players with spring-loaded clockwork players. Suffice it to say, “Standard” time hasn’t been “standard” in more than a hundred years. )
We have evolved a superior alternative that has become the de facto standard in everything but name.
Legacy time was developed by the robber barons in the late 19th century, to support industry. Improved time is an adjustment to that standard to favor the needs of the worker for rest and recreation. We cannot allow modern oligarchs to keep us on this outdated legacy system.
I’m really curious why you think it important that solar noon occurs at or after clock-noon. My only care is that they are close together, it doesn’t matter which is first.
Outdoor trades tend to start work around 7am, when noise ordinances are lifted, and knock off a couple hours after midday, to avoid the heat of summer. With midday at 11:30, summer sunrise was three hours before they could even start their work. All those cool morning hours, perfect for hard work, completely wasted, while workers suffer heat exhaustion in the afternoon.
Fortunately, we have only rarely used legacy time in summer in the past hundred years. We’ve built our legal and industrial infrastructure on the premise that solar noon will occur sometime between 12:30 and 13:30 local time for 8-9 months of the year.
Maintaining that historical expectation with permanent summer time will greatly reduce the transition to a “locked clock”.
Me too. I think a lot of ppl do as it literally gives (most) people more daylight to actually do stuff since most people work until like 3-6pm. Another side effect during ST is it crowds things that require daylight on the weekends. The days (in the northern hemisphere) are already shorter, add ST on top of it and now all the things that require daylight that people want to do after work have to wait until the weekend because they just don’t have enough time. Then the weekend comes and everyone is there because they all had to wait. Once DST comes there’s always noticeably smaller crowds cause now at least some people are able to go during the week.