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.
But wouldn’t it be neat if midnight was att 00:00 and mid day was 12:00?
Also, you don’t get more daylight by moving the clock. You get more clock.
Time of day is a human invention. We can assign the date lines wherever we like.
Like Japan was nuts. Dark at 3pm in winter. Light at 3am in summer. They’d benefit by shifting that shit two hours forward for sure.
I disagree. The angle of the sun is not a human invention. Trying to invent something from scratch based on that, I would definitely mark one time as “the darkest” and another “the lightest”.
I agree that hours, and therefore date lines and time zones are completely arbitrary though.
If we didn’t have hours we’d still need a way to group times by geographic or political regions; my example above still needs to handle the “lightest where?” question.
I think my conclusion is that organizing people and societies is arbitrary by nature.
It would be neater though to try to make midnight and mid day the basis for which we measure time. Stepping off of that makes it even more arbitrary.