EU to stop changing the clocks in 2019 | Hacker News Reader

EU to stop changing the clocks in 2019

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1,367 pointsjoshdance708 comments

I seriously considered taking time off a few years ago to lead a multi-state referendum to get the whole Pacific time zone to join Arizona in opting out of time changes. While researching it, I learned that you can legally either switch to PDT in the summer or remain on PST year-round, but the federal government doesn't allow a state to permanently be in PDT.

So, if the western states opted out of daylight savings time changes, they'd be an hour behind Arizona year-round, which would mean earlier sunsets year-round too. I gave up when I realized the choices were either lobby the federal government to change the regulation or change the entire culture of the western US to start and end its business day earlier.

California is actually voting on it this fall. Although like you mentioned it is dependent on the federal gov allowing it:

https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_7,_Permanent_...

Why is permanent DST being considered instead of an absolute abolition of DST?

People here in Southern California exercise and prefer extra sunshine. Farmers here are against the repeal as well. Even popular mechanic endorses DST as a good thing: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a18011/...

Exactly. Changing an entire culture is hard, so you just change the clock. People naturally wake up at some delta from sunrise, so it's inconvenient that we have set times to do things that aren't set based on time since sunrise. Of course the sun rises at different times everywhere, so it wouldn't be very convenient to say that we were going to have a conference call at sunrise+3 hours, when that's not a consistent time for both of us.

Instead we just approximate the correction with a one hour step function every year, and everyone is coordinated on it automatically. If a few programmers have to use more complicated date/time functions, it's a small price to pay for everyone to be able to keep their bodies on a more natural schedule.

"a few programmers have to use more complicated date/time functions"

This is a denial of the actual problem, which is that time zones get separated from times in practice. It's not a programming problem that can be solved by technicians. Blaming them is like blaming shortcomings of the taxation system on the IRS. As you wrote, "changing an entire culture is hard"

Yeah. I suppose it depends a lot on latitude, but where I grew up, businesses and schools would need summer and winter hours so that activity reasonably matches daylight. Having everybody change at once seems much easier than letting everybody do their own thing. Especially given that computers are handling more and more of the clock-changing workload these days.

You think that's bad? Canada is forced to follow the US. Whenever the US moves the dates/times we just mirror them. We want to get rid of the entire thing, but a north/south split would be a huge disruption to air traffic, at least for the passengers.

In the real north, the part with very short/long days/nights, an hour one way or the other really makes no difference.

Actually the impact on nations higher in latitude makes the time change more compelling.

The biggest issue is traffic accidents as a result of commuting directly into the rising or setting sun. It's especially acute if there are children crossing streets to get to school at the same time. It doesn't take many dead kids to make headlines.

If I remember correctly, Chile abolished DST, and then after they have a ton of traffic fatalities, they added it back two years later.

It's not as clear cut as people make it out to be.

"Forced" is a strong word. We do it because it makes things easier for business and commerce to follow the U.S.

It's nothing but a nuisance in Canada now that the DST period has been extended to 8 out of 12 months. Previously when it was shorter it'd have more of an impact during the spring and fall when it was shifting daylight to more "useful" times of day.

A huge disruption? It's managed without a fuss when traveling between the UK and the rest of the EU.

I'm on a team collaborating with branches in CA, IN, and NC. Given the majority of us (including the lead site) are on Eastern time, the CA team tends to dread milestone reviews since they have to be prepared and on the ball by 6am; the first few reviews started 5am PDT, but that quickly proved to be too painful for our CA brethren. If Pacific states decided to drop DST without (at least) Eastern states following suit, collaboration would become that much more difficult.

I feel like Central and Mountain states have the geographic flexibility to decide either way without significant impact to interstate commerce on the whole. From the same lens, Pacific and Eastern states don't appear to have the same flexibility insofar as the potential for a 4-hour gap if Pacific states drop DST while Eastern states perpetuate the status quo. I'm just selfishly thinking in terms of synchronization, overlap, engagement opportunity, jet lag...as if 3-hour gaps weren't already a chore.

I lived in Mountain time for a few years while still working east coast hours. It was awesome. Starting working around 6 meant I was done locally early. And done early was really done because the east coast was shutting down and going home. Much different than when you start around 5-6am and people give you funny looks when you leave around 2pm, or you get dragged into staying late through the day.

If gung-ho on the subject then why not split the difference and lobby the UN or the powers that be to add half an hour to ST in all time zones and eliminate DST? The only ones who might complain are those in Winter who live north of 40N or south of 40S latitude.

I would be in favor of abolishing the Pacific time zone and merging it with Mountain Time to create Western Standard Time. The mountain states can still do DST if they want, but the pacific states can just stay on WST all year round.

Is there a federal mandate that forces us to be in pacific time instead of mountain time?

> but the federal government doesn't allow a state to permanently be in PDT.

I mean this sincerely: I don't understand how the federal government gets away with stuff like this. I don't see where DST is in the constitution. And according to the 10th Amendment[0], that means that decision belongs to the States or the People, right? So the federal government, I suppose, could make the law, but the states should have the ability to say no to anything the Feds say without an Amendment being passed. What am I missing here?

0: https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/tenth_amendment

I imagine it falls under the weights and measures clause, considering the clock is how we measure time:

> To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;

It is a power granted by the “weights and measures” provision of the constitution (or so interpreted). Read the first paragraph the history section of this Wikipedia article for more details:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Time_Act

Do you think a city should have the power to ignore daylight savings time entirely, or should the state have the power to regulate all its cities? Where do you draw the line?

In practice, I imagine if California passed a state amendment fixing themselves to PST, the federal government would either change the law or refuse to enforce it. Opposing such an amendment would be pretty unpopular.

But in theory, the federal government does have power to "fix the Standard of Weights and Measures" nationwide. I see no reason for a court to rule this as being outside federal jurisdiction.

Nor do I. But I also have trouble believing that, were California (or any other state) to change timezones, abolish DST, or whatever combination thereof, that the federal government would have any power whatsoever to do anything about it.

Interstate commerce clause. It's been the reason for many the Congressional abuse, and it would be my go-to for any time I ask, "why can't the state(s) just tell the Feds to piss off?"

"Because in some infinitesimally small way, someone might lose money."

Others have addressed the federal government's legal right to set standards of weights and measures, but I just want to add that there's a legitimate interstate commerce argument as well. Prior to the application of time zones, train schedules were nearly impossible to keep consistent as every town had it's own 'time zone' being aligned to their solar noon.

Time is already crazy for programmers and logistics, but imagine it being essentially a continuously changing band with longitude with slight local variations. The modern economy relies on a sane, more or less consistent view of time.

200 years of arguing about state versus federal power/rights/law?

It's very possible that if a state decided to do this, and the feds tried to stop them, the state would win in court. But court is expensive, and it adds to a long list of "reasons why this might be more trouble than it's worth".

Probably some interstate commerce clause justification.

Can't you change your time-zone while opting out of PDT?

"Abolishing" DST means that there's no longer any PDT, just PST, MST, CST, EST... But abolishing DST while desiring to move to "summer time" just means, in practice, shifting the state from PST to MST.

The states alone cannot, because the time zones are set by Federal regulation. See https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=6a1a124065df269aff....

How does Arizona get away with it?

Could you change to PST for one day in summer and keep PDT the rest of the year?

No, when Daylight Savings transitions happen is federally regulated; you can opt out or opt in, but not customize.

The business will adapt if you fix the clock.

> the federal government doesn't allow a state to permanently be in PDT.

I don't recall this part of the enumerated powers of the federal government from when I read the constitution. Has there been a recent amendment?

> I don't recall this part of the enumerated powers of the federal government from when I read the constitution. Has there been a recent amendment?

No, it's in the bare unamended text:

“The Congress shall have power [...] To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures” (Art. I, Sec. 8; emphasis added)

After the EU does this, 90%+ of the world population will have abandoned DST changes. The only holdouts will be North America, a few Middle Eastern & African countries, some Brazilian provinces, and 4-5 other small countries or provinces.

Sounds like a repeat of the Imperial vs Metric system divide. Why does the USA always have to be the odd major modern country using obsolete customs? Is there a cultural explanation?

> Is there a cultural explanation?

Yes they're lacking in culture. :P

Seriously though, I think culturally they think whatever they're doing must be "the best", irregardless of whatever the rest of the world thinks. And it caused NASA disasters too!

> they think whatever they're doing must be "the best", irregardless of what <others> think

The word that comes to my mind is "arrogance". Is there a better fitting word? (Honest question, not a native speaker)

>I think culturally they think whatever they're doing must be "the best", irregardless of whatever the rest of the world thinks.

Funny, one could say the same about Europeans. And it'd be an equally sweeping and divisive claim.

You've missed parts of Australia and New Zealand, plus the UK (which will have left the EU by then and may keep DST).

DST seems to be one of those weird Anglophone things that we do, I would't criticise the USA directly for this one, they're not alone. As a New Zealander I was actually surprised to learn that DST isn't standard across the globe.

You think UK will keep it after Brexit if EU doesn't? I doubt it. Australia has a strange situation where some states observe DST and some don't. (Or had 10 years ago anyhow)

May have left the EU. No clear plan for doing this has yet been presented, and doing it without a plan looks like immediate disaster.

Setting aside the fact that public opinion is already changing in the US and several states are already voting to do away with DST, do you really think it’s fair to criticize the US for being one of the few countries using an “obsolete” custom when the EU hasn’t even made the transition yet?

There are plenty of valid reasons to criticize the US but this isn’t one of them. And the mere fact that you would read an article about the EU and your mind immediately jumps to what the US will do almost lends credence to the idea that the US is indeed exceptional.

Anecdotes aren't data but everyone I've talked to about this subject in the states is either ambivalent or tired of DST and would not miss it. It's just that in order to make the switch, the whole country has to commit together for it to not be a pain, and that's a big lift for something that the public thinks about twice a year. It'd take some current event or an extended public campaign plus momentum to get over the hump.

Brazil does not have provinces, it has states and territories.

In my experience, americans say “everyone” when they mean “everyone in the country” and “the whole world” when they mean “the usa”. This may shed some light into the psychological context for such decisions (or lack thereof).

Unwillingness to change, plus a STRONG unwillingness to be told to change.

Can we move to UTC exclusively next please? Enough with vague abbreviations only people who use them understand like EET, PST and whatnot.

"I live in UTC+2 and you live int UTC-5, meeting at 15:00UTC?" ain't that easier? I add 2 hours, you take away 5 - math a 6 year old can do. And yet we refer to timezones with some made up meaningless words like Easter European Time - what does that even mean? It's not even accurate description as not all Eastern Europe follows it - pure madness.

> Can we move to UTC exclusively next please

Your phrasing was ambiguous. For a moment I thought you meant https://qntm.org/abolish. Still, you can't remove the past, and since the names carrying disambiguating meaning (notably DST changes, is UTC+01:00 CET or BST?) even if you remove them for the future the past still exists so you still have to handle them.

UTC is explicit, you don't need to know anything than your local number. With current system you need to learn what all of these dumb abbreviations mean and their relations to your dumb abbreviation - it's pure madness and I just can't fanthom how this even came to existance when we had GMT since 1884.

Can you imaging changing date in the middle of the day !

- I'm going to lunch I see you early tomorrow ? - But we have meeting this afternoon ! - Yes tomorrow, should I remind you we are UTC+12 ?

This doesn't remove the problem, only shift it to different place.

From the local perspective: "I always eat breakfast at 8am!" - two people can communicate when they eat (or do whatever). When you move to different country instead of sticking to your routine (minus jet-lag) you have to adjust your brain to completely different hours.

Benefits of using UTC internationally would only be good for companies and people that do a lot of international meetings so using UTC would make their life easier (instead of wrapping their heads around multiple timezones)

I don't think they were advocating for using UTC exclusively, just identifying their own timezone relative to UTC when communicating with someone in a different hour. For example: "I always eat breakfast at 08:00 UTC+01, so I prefer to do that Skype call we planned at 09:00 UTC+01 at the earliest. Is that fine with you or do you have plans in the evening?"

If you're not in UTC+01, it's easier to work out what time that would be for you than if I said I wanted to have a tele-meeting at 09:00 CET.

Can we go back to calling it GMT as well?

UTC and GMT are similar but not the same.

GMT does not observe leap seconds for instance.

GMT and UTC are not semantically the same though. In this case UTC makes more sense as it doesn't depends on Greenwich time.

GMT should be defined by UTC, but not the other way around

Nice, I hope US can do the same one day. DST changes twice a year are an unnecessary burden.

I am also not too hopeful about US changing considering its federal-state model. In EU, multiple countries can agree on a decision, but US states are adept at bikeshedding and not getting anything done :(

This is a bit needlessly cynical, because individual states already have the power to choose whether or not to observe daylight savings time. Arizona and Hawaii already don't, and there are bills in the Florida and Massachusetts legislatures to do the same.

The only federal regulation that applies here is that states wouldn't have the option to choose between summer or winter time as their permanent time, as the EU states can. IOW, US states are allowed to disregard the observance of DST, but they can't change their time zone without federal congressional approval.

Florida's bill passed, but it's conditional to Congress or the DoT's authorization

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/08/us/daylight-saving-time-f...

Arizona and Hawaii already don't

And Indiana. Except for the part that's part of the Chicago market.

And about a quarter of Arizona actually does change time. The Navajo Nation goes with New Mexico/Denver time.

> IOW, US states are allowed to disregard the observance of DST, but they can't change their time zone without federal congressional approval.

Interestingly, that seems to be the exact opposite of EU where countries can choose their own timezones but (currently) have to observe DST.

I lived in Indiana when they decided to adopt DST. The reasoning was that interacting with other time zones which had DST while they didn’t was expensive. It’s bad to not use DST until none (or few) do.

Here in Indiana there was an attempt to go off DST for a long while but it became more of a problem because it was inconsistent with all of the other places nearby and for people going through.

Pretty sure you can include Maine in that group of states as well...

Same with leap days and leap seconds, why not just count forward at a consistent rate?

The federal government did extend the dates of daylight saving time for no particular reason just a few years back. Congress has the power to change it for everyone, there's no reason to blame the federal model.

I know this is against the bandwagon but still: it was just fine the way it was. Changing the clocks (that is, society's timetable) to match the suntime is a good idea. And countries should absolutely have the freedom to choose what suits them best.

Now we're going to have to pick either summer time or winter time, to be on all year. Pick the latter? Bye-bye awesome summer afternoons with the sun setting down at 8:30. Pick the former? Say hello to waking up in darkness with the sun rising at 9 during winter.

"it was just fine the way it was."

I agree. Before the nonsense about turning the clock twice a year was "invented".

"During World War I, in an effort to conserve fuel, Germany began observing DST on May 1, 1916." [0]

See, there was shortage of fuel, and they thought DST would save energy. I don't think anyone has any credible data to support that it does. This has been an ongoing experiment for a century. Maybe we all can declare the experiment over.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_the_Un...

I don't see how invoking the original (flawed) rationale has any relevance on whether or not it ended up being a good idea for other reasons.

A net energy loss/gain analysis of DST would be interesting, at least from the consumption side. That could impact carbon emissions which would be relevant today, right?

"Changing the clocks (that is, society's timetable) to match the suntime is a good idea"

Except that's not what we do. The sun doesn't shift rise and set times by an hour on two magic days of the year. You know this right?

Of course. It’s called an approximation—I’m sure you know this though. Being a pedant doesn’t lead to interesting and/or productive conversations.

There's a lot of unused sunlight hours in the morning in the summer, so we change our clocks to make use of it. That's how we "match the suntime".

Losing an hour of sleep is bad for you, and having a mandated lost hour of sleep every year could be more than just bad for some people:

https://healthblog.uofmhealth.org/heart-health/why-daylight-...

I agree with you. I grew up in South Africa with no daylight savings time. In the summertime the sun would be up and shining by 5am and would set by 7:30pm.

Now that I've experienced daylight savings time in both the UK and NZ, I would much rather have a minor inconvenience twice a year to make the most of the sunny days.

It speaks volumes that we find it easier to redefine time than to go to bed and wake to earlier.

You can't change the number of daylight hours in a day by fiddling with your clocks. That's just impossible. All DST does is move an hour of daylight from the morning to the evening.

> setting down at 8:30

uh, in France it's more like 10pm in Paris at the end of June, and 10:20 in Brest (western France).

France is also a full time zone West of where it should be.

Well, we voted and we do not like it.

At 1st of July sun sets in Amsterdam at 22.04 and rises at 5.22. Summertime doesn't make much of a difference. It's basically light all day. In winter it's the opposite. Just live with it and try not to be depressed. :-)

> Pick the former? Say hello to waking up in darkness with the sun rising at 9 during winter.

If I recall correctly the EU prefers their members to choose this because most people prefer more daylight at the end of the day.

I hope they do, I don't mind the darkness in the morning but that extra hour of light at the end of the day helps me go outside after dinner instead of turning on the telly and doing nothing all evening.

> Bye-bye awesome summer afternoons with the sun setting down at 8:30

For whatever it's worth, there are plenty of people who hate this. The sun is still up when they're going to bed, meaning summer is a season of lost sleep.

I'm one of those few, because I have to get up really early, so I also gotta get to bed really early and I have trouble sleeping when it's light outside.

Most European countries did start using summer time until the late 70’ early 80’, I assure you eliminating summer time would be a non-issue.

Even with DST at about 60° North latitude we wake up in darkness during winter. But having sunsets after 10PM in summer is really nice.

> And countries should absolutely have the freedom to choose what suits them best.

Unfortunately that's not how the EU works.

Or make work periods 10am - 6pm in the summer..

Is that not precisely what DST does?

I've always wanted to abolish not only DST, but time zones in general. Sure, it's cool that noon means the sun is high, but increasingly the cost of managing anything across zones (or across days, or both) is notably higher than the relatively rare cost of learning "I moved to a new state, my work hours are during daylight, 3pm-11pm".

When coordinating we can just use the same times. "Conference call will be at 5pm." "That's early for me, can we make it 6pm?" Instead of "Okay, call will be at 9am" "In what time zone?" "Eastern". "that's 6am for me, can we make it 8?" "You mean 10am? Sure".

I had a road trip to the grand Canyon. Nothing like crossing from Pacific, to Mountain, to AZ (with no DST) and into federal land in AZ (with DST). Coordinated with another couple coming to the same spot from a different direction. It was...non-trivial...and we often gave up on actually knowing when something was, being happy if we were coordinated within a few hours.

How do you feel about https://qntm.org/abolish , "So You Want To Abolish Time Zones"

>> causes the question "What time is it there?" to be useless/unanswerable

The question should have been "what time can I call you" anyway. Not everyone works a 9-5. My in-laws get pissed if I call while they're napping and don't want to turn off their phones in case there's an emergency. Some of my friends work night-shifts in the medical field. I put my kids to bed early and my colleagues start their work day exceptionally late. You have to coordinate anyway because everyone is in a unique situation.

>> necessitates significant changes to the way in which normal people talk about time

And right now, how I talk about time varies depending on where in the state I am and what time of year it is and where in the state the person I'm talking to is.

I could go on. I'm sure there are complexities to eliminating time zones I haven't thought of, but honestly this sounds like they're trying to exaggerate the problem and it doesn't even sound that bad.

The article poses the question:

I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there?

Google tells me it is currently 4:25am there, so I'd better not call.

The answer without time zones would be:

It's 18:30 UTC

Google tells me business hours are 23:00 to 03:00, so I'd better not call.

Abolishing time zones would make little difference to this kind of question, it will always rely on knowledge of local hours and on top of that your Uncle's schedule.

It would simplify a lot of coordination though.

Unlikely to happen any time soon IMO as people are attached to the status quo and have no big reason to change.

We could make up a new system to make it equally confusing for everyone: https://www.swatch.com/en_gb/internet-time/

It's what I always suggest whenever someone doesn't know what to do when presented with a UTC timestamp I have them.

Some of the points are valid concerns (no system will be perfect as long as we rely on the sun as being significant, which I'm expecting to be pretty normal for quite a while), but the author overcomplicates and overemphasizes the initial point.

"what time is it there?" isn't trying to figure out what time it is, it's trying to say "Should I expect my uncle to be awake?" _and_ then has to rely on a combination of google and internal expectations about a "normal" day to make that determination. In a single zone, you instead need to know how long the sun has been up there, which "4am" is just a shorthand to answer. Obviously if "4am" starts answering "how far away from now is it" (which the current system doesn't answer) and stops answering ("how long since sunrise") then we'll adopt another system to answer that second question. Given that the author literally consults a computer to manage our current system, doing so to get the answer in a new system doesn't sound any harder (and we'd quickly adopt a shorthand that we don't use today because we have nowhere to use it).

All other complaints build from that one. I don't want to minimize the complications of dealing with "days", but at the same time it's crazy to pretend that we're doing it just fine now. It fails ALL THE TIME now. Package shipping, news articles, etc. Heck, Fake News stories for April 1 now span a 36-48 hour period.

Pretending the current system works better just because we're used to the quirks is a false premise. Saying it would hard to switch is valid, but it's a short time high cost vs a perpetual but lower cost. Look at the US and the metric system, or recognizing that you can't find a reasonable definition of "planet" and include Pluto. (Okay, that last doesn't really have costs the way we lose multi-million dollar probes or smaller but more common errors in measurement conversions, but it does show how much resistance people will put up to avoid temporary discomfort).

Does anyone think we'll get LESS global? Does anyone think our current "day"-based system will work when there is more than a colony on Mars? (That may be 50 -100 years out, but I'm point the direction of the trend). At some point sunlight-based systems cost way more than we get for it. If someone doesn't think we're there yet, that doesn't mean the problem won't happen, so these same issues will still exist when we get there (in their mind).

"I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there? Google tells me it is currently 4:25am there. Does that mean I can call him? I don't know."

Google can also direct me to other very intuitive tools like this: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/sunearth.html

I think the 'Reduction to absurd' argument went a little too far in the article you link.

More practical solutions are like the (in)famous Internet Time by Swatch.

The day was divided by 1000 beats and it was the same all over the world.

Call me at @500 was a perfectly valid answer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

Only helpful while we're (nearly) all on the same celestial body.

What matters is whether someone is by convention asleep, working, or relaxing.

I expect we'll plug UTC into some software to determine exactly that. Or more directly, ping their calendar to see when they designate themselves available.

> Instead, solar days are now formally given hybrid names, as in "it's Friday/Saturday today".

This is also useful when living on the 28-hour day schedule.

https://xkcd.com/320/

You’re free to use GMT if you want. The rest of us would prefer it not to change from Friday to Saturday in the middle of lunch.

That's a good point, but it's not like midnight makes the most sense as the start of the day either. If you're talking after midnight, most people aren't going to consider what happened 1 hour ago as "yesterday at 11 pm."

Why would it matter if it is technically midnight Saturday in the middle of lunch? Does the name of the day affect you?

Remember that the premise here is that nothing would change other than the labels we assign to periods of time.

I mean China makes it work and it spans 5 time zones. It's not "Friday to Saturday" in the middle of lunch but it's not far from it.

You will achieve nothing by getting rid of timezones, really.

Instead of calculating timezones, you will start to calculate when people actually want to sleep, which is actually harder without set "zones". So you end up with "awake/business zones" instead of timezones.

This is such a terrible idea that would cause so much confusion. I’m suprised someone always mentions this suggestion in time zone discussions.

How would being on the same time help anyone trying to coordinate? Instead of remembering Australia is X hours ahead you would have to memorize the exact time business starts/ends in every locale.

For most people international time coordination issues are rare, rare enough that it's more valuable to have a local time, to tell someone you're meeting at 13:30 so they have a natural feeling for the fact it's comfortably after lunch, but not too late.

For everything else there's UTC.

The only people I know that want to get rid of timezones are technical people, often programmers.

Which is crazy to me, because we literally invented computers to solve the coordination issue with timezones. Getting rid of timezones just offloads the difficulty back to our brains.

Just use UTC. This is routine in aviation. Although consumers see airline schedules in local time, behind the scenes everything is done in UTC.

How can you argue for such a thing while at the same time using am/pm (opposed to 15:00-23:00 etc.)? O:)

It's really not that hard. Just ask Google to translate the time for you. Which I feel also demonstrates that the cost are not particularly high either. It mostly effects programmers and doesn't really require ongoing costs once a system is setup to deal with it. If it's too hard for the programmers we probably need to write some better libraries.

ISPs commonly set all equipment and systems that log, or alert, or do just about anything, all to UTC. makes things a lot simpler. It does mean that things like maintenance notification need to be manually converted to local customer time by a NOC, though.

I agree but now that you're on that, why don't get rid of the confusing "am/pm" thing and embrace a 24-hour clock?

I was casually in favour of this; I recently mentioned it to my mother in passing, and she pointed out that the UK had trialled this in 1968-1971. She was (surprisingly to me) immediately opposed to it - living in Scotland, she recalled that it was basically dark until 10am, and resulted in a bunch of upheaval as children were no longer able to travel safely to school by themselves, among other things.

They could push the school start time back. It would be better for kids everywhere, not just Scotland.

I figure it will not be easy to change the school start time, since parents are also need to change behavior with the school start time change.

In the end maybe this will be easier to just have a consistent schedule to change the school start time. In the end we invent DST again.

You must mean push the school time forward? pushing it back would just mean they spend more time in darkness.

I'm being needlessly pedantic (sorry) but "back" and "forward" in time is a confusing concept best thought of in terms to "traveling back in time" (decrement your clock, move to an earlier time) "traveling forward in time" (increment your clock, move to a later time).

Saying "push back" is a very confusing phrase to me because I don't actually know what you mean and need to pick it up from context clues which are not always right.

So kids can go to school one hour later, so they'll stay in bed one hour longer. But this means that they can go to bed one hour later?

This means we'll do the DST switch anyways, but without changing the clocks. Nothing gained...

Changing the school time would wreck havoc on a host of other things.

According to a quick internet search, Scotland has about 8 hours of sunlight in the winter and about 18 hours in the summer. You'd have to shift by about 4 hours to keep sunrise at the same time in both mid winter and mid summer. I'm guessing that's not what they were doing and that right around December 21st the kids are going to school in the dark no matter what, or else the sun was coming up at 3 am in the summer. Either way, a one hour shift wasn't making that big of a difference.

An hour can make a big difference! Inverness gets about 6:30 daylight during the winter, with sunrise at about 9:00 and sunset around 3:30. Shifting to year-round summer time would move sunrise to 10:00; an hour can be the difference between "I can see things" twilight and "It's basically night".

I'm not really that bothered myself, having worked weird hours for a long time. But I can definitely see problems it could cause.

I feel the same way, the further north you are the bigger a factor it becomes. I can see issues with icy roads on winter mornings too. Daylight savings makes sense, just not everywhere. The change is happening now though.

Even though it would lead to darker mornings I'd still support adopting summer time here in Ireland. Dark evenings when you get home from work are just too depressing.

> I feel the same way, the further north you are the bigger a factor it becomes.

On the other hand, the further north you go, the more they already deal with this. DST or not, kids in Alaska go to school in the dark for a good part of winter. Somehow they survive.

Seems like they picked summer time, not winter time as the default

> living in Scotland, she recalled that it was basically dark until 10am, and resulted in a bunch of upheaval as children were no longer able to travel safely to school by themselves

Meanwhile, in Scandinavia, this is the reality of November, December and January for everyone. Entire countries manage to go to school and work when it's dark outside...

That makes no sense. The clocks change in the summer, not the winter, and in summer Scotland sees about 20 hours of sunlight.

Clocks change twice a year, not once a year.

We had 4 hours of night in the highlands and that was hard to sleep through.

Sure, but in the case I was talking about the UK switched to BST (i.e. GMT+1) year-round. This has the effect of making it darker on winter mornings.

Just open schools later in winter then. Also that's really just due to the choice of time zone, not how clocks are changed in the summer.

So if everything will switch to a later time in winter, it's the same effect as moving clocks forward in the summer?

It's not so easy to start school later, because the parents might have fixed entry/exit times at work. DST sucks but it has the advantage that everything synchronizes on when to switch.

Don't change the clocks, just do everything an hour later!

Seems like the worst of both worlds.

The idea of a trial was again brought up in 2010 - 2012, it was rejected due to the same reasons, I think Scotland weren’t happy about it. https://services.parliament.uk/bills/2010-12/daylightsaving....

It depends. If they keep wintertime, that won’t happen

>given member states until April to decide if they will remain on summer or winter time

Oh this will be fun. Imo every country should be in the same time zone but I can imagine say Netherlands stay in summmer, Belgium in winter, Germany in summer, Poland in winter. Sounds fun!

I hope it's just a vague article and they mean member countries from the same timezone should decide together where they stay. Given there are 3 timezones in the EU it shouldn't be a big problem (or yes)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_European_Summer_Time#/...

It’s not like EU countries are all in the same timezone now...? Presumably the big countries will coordinate and the small ones will follow suit where it makes economic sense.

This is also an opportunity to fix timezone assignments that don’t work very well at the edges: for example Spain shouldn’t be on CET.

Spaniard here. CET is perfectly fine. Time is just a convention, and sharing a timezone is better.

From somebody living in Spain - we quite enjoy our extra hours of useful (evening) sunlight, thank you very much!

If you look at the map in the article, currently the largest part of the EU is in one timezone, which is increadibly convenient. It would be sad to have that split apart. Especially if that means, that the time zones are split apart in any other matter than an clear east-west sorting.

It's not just a matter of economic sense, it's also an issue of whether children are walking to and from school in the dark (or how dark, or how much time spent in the dark, etc).

Compare Naples: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/italy/naples

And Stockholm: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/sweden/stockholm

Some people in HN seem to have the opinion that businesses should just adjust their working hours... but isn't that what DST does? It coordinates the change of business working hours across many businesses.

There's tons of legacy timezone pickers that bundle together cities like Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, etc etc... Often, users in smaller countries have to pick a neighboring country's capital city since their own is not listed.

I really hope countries who are currently sharing a time zone don't split ways, or computer clocks and calendars will be doomed to be "maybe off by one hour?" for a decade at least.

If you're handling timezones, and you're not using tz files, you deserve any pain heading your way. Timezone rules change constantly and trying to roll your own is disastrous. (And I say that in the grave baritone voice of personal experience.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database

Not to mention not really cleverly designed connected devices. I work with connected meteorological stations which use the local timezone where the station is installed instead of UTC to label their records...

Not a chance that the Dutch won't follow whatever the Germans will choose.

Now Belgium... I could see Flanders move to summertime and the Walloons join the French in going for wintertime.

I'd imagine the Benelux countries would stay together as there is so much cooperation between them.

I know that here in Belgium the decision will also keep the choices of our neighbouring countries in mind and likely involve talks with them. I do think this will eventually will be the case for a lot of countries.

I find it also kind of ironic because when Europe does not give countries the individual choice people complain about how it forces its will. And now countries have that choice it’s also not good.

>> The decision to tackle the issue was prompted after the Commission launched an online survey. Some 4.6 million Europeans answered the survey — three million of those respondents were from Germany — with 80 percent of them voting to scrap the practice.

At first glance that approach appears to be a deeply flawed way to make policy which affects 28 member states.

What would happen if the commission started asking for more policy-making input from citizens via online surveys?

> What would happen if the commission started asking for more policy-making input from citizens via online surveys?

They already do. At any given point in there there are multiple ongoing consultations[0]. It actually works fine.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/info/consultations_en

Online surveys are a horrible idea for this kind of information gathering. You have effectively zero idea if the respondents are even in the EU. All it takes is a VPN subscription to completely trash an online survey of this nature.

It may seem like they're throwing policy to the wind but something to consider is that the events leading up to the assessment of DST, as well as the public consultation on the matter, were down to both citizens initiative and feedback as well as Member States directly appealing to the commission, as Lithuania asked for a review on the matter to take into account regional differences and Finland asked for it to be abandoned all together[0]. The matter is now left for the European Parliament and by extension MEPs from individual Member States to vote on, all in all it's like an extended referendum that then needs to be voted on in Parliament, everybody from citizens to elected officials get a say.

It's also not too concerning that Germany ended up with 3 million of the citizens consultation vote, it's only a 4% participation rate for Germany and while 25 other Member States only had a participation rate of less than 1% those that voted were overwhelmingly (>75%) in favour of abolishing DST, with only Cyprus, Greece, and Malta being on the fence (with around 50/50%)[1]. It's also the highest amount of responses so far of any public consultation.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/info/consultations/2018-summertime-arra...

[1] http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-5302_en.htm

Everything still has to go through the EU Parliament, no need to panic...

I suspect the alternative would be to simply not have the online poll, without anything replacing it. That's likely how it was in the 90s.

I'm not in favor of permanently being on Summer time, which is one of the options. Humans are already too disconnected from the physical world, I'd hate to see us completely lose the association of "Noon" with the Sun being at it's highest point in the sky. Yeah, I know. Hopeless romantic...

But I'd love to see the end of Daylight Saving Time. I hate the biannual screwing of my body clock.

Ponferrada, Spain (42°33′N) has the same time as Skopje, Republic of Macedonia (42°0′N) (both are on CEST); however, in Ponferrada the sun passes through the meridian at 2:20pm today while in Skopje it does at 12:28pm.

https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/spain/ponferrada

https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/republic-of-macedonia/...

With this new regulation, Spain can adopt a time zone that makes more sense for them while not having to change clocks twice a year.

I hate to break this to you but at least in continental Europe, you don't find a big area where the sun is at its highest point in the sky.

The CET timezone has that property for the town of Goerlitz or, to a slightly less extend, Vienna. That means almost all of Germany, France, and Spain doesn't already have that property.

I have no particular attachment to noon meaning "highest point of the sun in the sky". Though I admit I am totally unaware of what time that happens where I live.

That said, it would only be a very few people who experience this, even on the "correct" time. Time zones are what disconnected time from the sun, not daylight savings.

> Humans are already too disconnected from the physical world, I'd hate to see us completely lose the association of "Noon" with the Sun being at it's highest point in the sky.

This has never really been the case to begin as a wide (geographical) range of countries is part of the same time zone, meaning for instance that noon in Spain is not really noon.

Summer time only for me. I have no interest in it getting dark near 5pm. (SF Bay Area)

In France, the norm is to start work three/four hours before noon and finish six/seven hours after noon (and of course do stuff after work but not before). If we stay on winter time, I can say goodbye to sunlight for most of the year.

I think this is a non issue. I’m just happy that I will be able enjoy more time after work while it’s not dark yet.

I like Summer time precisely so people can go outside and enjoy the physical world more. It's miserable to work until 5:30pm and have to turn your headlights on to go home.

I'm with you. We should be more in tune with the world and natural measurements rather than less.

But the EU also thinks that the metric system is the bee's knees, even though it's just as arbitrary as the imperial system.

At least lengths in the imperial system are based on natural averages, and not some bureaucrat that decided to use a distance to Pairs. The equator, I could understand. But using Paris just proves that it's all about political control, and not actually improving a system of measurement.

FYI, California is voting on no longer changing the clocks this November. It requires the federal government to sign off on it... but it will be voted on at least:

https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_7,_Permanent_...

I have lived in Phoenix, Arizona my whole life. I didn't know what DST was until I was in high school. The entire concept feels bizarre to me.

The only time I've run into confusion when coordinating a meeting with another time zone is during the DST change. Yes, this week we are two hours behind but next week it is only one, etc.

Summer time really only matters for a few weeks of the year in the farish north of Ireland. (Coincidentally, right around now) when the sunrise and sunset are changing the fastest. We're losing 4 minutes of daylight a day now as we slam towards equinox. Middle of the summer? Sky never really gets dark.

Though, with brexit over the horizon, it's conceivable that Ireland and Northern Ireland will end up on two different sides of daylight savings. Which will be all sorts of annoying.

> it's conceivable that Ireland and Northern Ireland will end up on two different sides of daylight savings. Which will be all sorts of annoying.

This won’t happen, both NI and ROI would oppose it on both the union and republican sides. It makes no sense, neither does brexit and the NI browser will stop brexit, it is an unsolvable problem.

I find the passion on this topic really weird. Yes, it's a minor annoyance twice a year. On the scale of annoyances I have to deal with, it doesn't rate in the top thousand. The traffic every single day, the late trains, random bad weather when I'm not expecting it.... are all significantly more annoying.

And for the price of that inconvenience I get an extra hour after work where I can enjoy the outdoors during summer for a whole 6 months of the year. Gardening, dining outside, going for walks, playing sport etc.

I can get people find it a little annoying and even disagree with it ... but I am perplexed by how passionate people seem to be about it.

My first thought reading this article was: "I can't believe the EU uses daylight savings time. I thought the US was the only country that would ever go along with that kind of nonsense."

Then I read this part:

> The practice, which was used as a means to conserve energy during the World Wars as well as the oil crises of the 1970s, became law across the bloc in 1996.

> All EU countries are required to move forward by an hour on the last Sunday of March and back by an hour on the final Sunday in October.

...and my second thought is: "wow, the EU members must give a lot more control to their central government, in the US the states do whatever they want with their timezones and would scoff at that kind of micromanagement."

Now, you're saying that the states actually are substantially constrained by federal regulation and I am much less optimistic than I was about our current mechanisms of government and democracy when it comes to dealing with timezone policy.

I don't see how this is different from what the United States federal government attempted with the Metric system back in the 1970s. Granted, the effort failed, but more due to cultural inertia than due to any resistance from the states, as far as I'm aware of.

It makes sense for a trade bloc to maintain the same changeover dates for timezones, while leaving the timezone offsets up to each country, because this makes timezone conversions predictable, which I imagine is handy whenever cross-border scheduling is needed.

You could call it micromanagement, but do remember that the member states vote over these things, so it's not like they didn't have a chance to reject it.

One thing to remember about the EU is that anything that can be implemented at a higher administrative level is something that you, the government of the member state, are no longer responsible for. If you need to implement an unpopular but necessary measure, all you have to do is get the bigger member states to go along with it, and presto, you can wash your hands of it, with responsibility diluted across the Brussels bureaucracy and no one in particular to blame.

>I thought the US was the only country that would ever go along with that kind of nonsense

I'm not trying to be snarky, but do you honestly know so little about the world outside the US? have you never traveled?

There are a massive number of countries that observe Daylight savings - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_by_countr...

This is great news for simplicity. I hope that we can eventually just all use UTC.

> asked the President and Congress to pass an act that would allow California to adopt year-round DST

The states need to ask permission for that? What ever happened to "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."

Everyone using UTC would be chaos. Imagine organising a remote meeting - you’d have to figure out which hours each party would be awake, by googling “waking hours in Germany” for example.

That died pretty quick

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCulloch_v._Maryland

Summer time is really difficult for kids in winter. How are they supposed to be awake when it’s 8:30am and still dark outside?

I take it you don't live anywhere a fairly northern latitude. Up here DST or not makes no difference, it'll still be night at that time and kids do just fine.

One solution (which may or may not be reasonable) is to have a norm where individual schools/offices/stores adjust the start time a few times throughout the year as sunrise changes. DST is basically a way to force everyone to do that together. A synchronized time shift has a lot of advantages, but also is forced even on places that don't need it (some latitudes, some types of businesses), and in some cases the 1-hour shift isn't enough, so it's not clear to me which approach is better.

I wrote a very reasonable text explaining my position (when I did the online vote) in wanting to abolish the DST bullshit and then when deciding which time to choose I'd prefer winter time for this exact same reason. I'm not oblivious to how painful sad, mad and traumatizing it was waking up to go to school in pitch black. As if I care about a few more artificial day hours at the end of the day. Just let it all be consistent and let my body adapt correctly to the changes that occur naturally over the year in how the sun changes. Noticing the sun adding or removing time daily or weekly is a relaxing thing. Much more than suddenly my perception being changed abruptly and not feeling where and when the sun is at all for weeks after DST change.

My kids don't seem to care how dark it is. They can be happily awake in the middle of the night.

just adjust the start time of school

If you get rid of DST then it's not summer time in the winter, it's the same time it's always been in the winter.

Erm, their parents can wake them up, or they have an alarm. Exactly like it already works.

I always thought that DST is unnecessary and did not really understand the rationale behind it. I mean, sure, in 1916 it might have made sense to conserve those cca. 3% in home electricity consumption. Today, however, spending more time at home in the heat may introduce additional costs through higher use of air condition. I guess wikipedia's article on DST rationale can explain better than I can :)

That said, doing away with DST is IMO not necessary. People are already used to it and there is little confusion, even if people have to be reminded each year. How the benefits compare to the drawbacks I cannot judge, there are different arguments either way.

But...

The way the EU decided to approach this is worse. Every country will be able to decide whether they want to keep summer time or they want the "normal" time? I think that's another example where the compromise just destroys every benefit of the proposal.

I live in a small country where a lot of our businesses work with neighbouring countries. There is even a significant percentage of people that live here but go to work to another country. So, the kids' kindergarten will use a different time than your workplace?

I think this will create much more confusion and stress if the different countries choose different times than the problems we have now with the switching.

I guess there are countries that have this problem already (if the neighbouring country is in a different time zone) but still we may introduce the problem to places that did not have it before.

I don't think that's a highly informed comment. As far as I'm aware choosing time zones has always been a member state decision, where as clock time changes have been regulated by EU in order to be uniform. Nothing changes in regards to time zone regulation. It's just a political expression to say that you can choose to be in "summer time". In reality there's no such thing as permanent summer time.

The reason why it's politically expressed this way is because there is a strong majority consensus that summer time probably isn't useful, but there's isn't one about which time zone should be used. So expressing it this way makes it easier for the politicians.

> I live in a small country where a lot of our businesses work with neighbouring countries. There is even a significant percentage of people that live here but go to work to another country. So, the kids' kindergarten will use a different time than your workplace?

I think that's a fairly small problem, and there's a good chance that it'll solve as many cases as it makes worse. For example, the longest single border within the EU is Portugal/Spain. Right now they're in different timezones, but that doesn't make a lot of sense - it leaves Spain in the same TZ as Poland, and with a noticeable unusually late sunrise/sunset. This would be a nice chance for Spain to sync up with Portugal/the UK/Morocco instead, all of whom match its longitude much closer.

Might well not happen, but it's certainly not clear that it'd make life more difficult than it is now.

The amount of car accidents is higher on mondays after the switch, this alone is a reason for me to abolish DST. Your body needs 2 weeks to fully adjust after the change, i.e. a full month a year your inner clock is out of tune.

It's called Daylight Saving Time (DST), not Electricity Saving Time (EST ?!). While some of the thoughts around it seems to have started with energy consumption (and thus cost) in mind (which proved useful in time of war), those were just consequences with little to no reason nowadays. The reasons are astronomical and therefore DST must be somewhat observed; it's the implementation approach that must be improved (IMHO together with the time-zones implementation), but people doesn't seems to understand it.

>but still we may introduce the problem to places that did not have it before.

And perhaps in some places this will cause the problem to disappear. I think it will be fine.

I believe the subtext here is that Spain should use this as an opportunity to decide whether they should shift time zones altogether.

There's a significant cost to this work. Machines have to be upgraded: OS's changed, libraries updated. They did this in Russia and it caused us a headache due to python libs that needed updating and then OS changes. etc. etc.

time zones change all the time. Most OS's automatically take these changes into account, I believe. ( see https://serverfault.com/questions/192858/updating-systems-ol... for a bit of info, but I think it is often included in OS updates rather than having to do it manually normally.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database https://www.iana.org/time-zones

But of course there will be many legacy systems that assumes that all of Europe is on the same zone.

Every year there are tens of changes to various time zones/calculations/all that fun stuff that get compiled into the tz updates that your OS vendor will ship and install.

This is nothing new.

Indeed time changes are a complex software issue, which is why getting rid of them and making it simpler is the long-term solution.

If they choose an existing timezone, not really, unless things aren't on NTP.

Just don't swing the tz over like normal.

Time Zones are already a huge PITA no matter how you slice it.

This video sums it up fairly nicely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY

That sound you can faintly hear is the screaming of a million developers who maintain all the datetime libraries in the world.

I have a delayed circadian rhythm. Managing to live on time is already really hard for me. Changing the clocks twice a years for me means a few weeks of jetlag every year. I wish I lived in the EU.

Just based on your observations? I'm asking because I wanted to check how mine looks like. Smartwatch heart rate doesn't seem to be a good enough measure and I have no easy way to check my core temperature every hour. So is there any scientific way to check one's own circadian rhythm at home? Preferably without stopping drinking coffee ;)

Don’t choose France. I used to live there but they’re off by an hour. Same time zone as Poland. It’s ridiculous. Best thing I did for my health was crossing the channel...

My phone updates automatically. My computer updates automatically. My alarm clock uses a time signal. Only my oven needs adjusting.

If we wanted to, we could change the clocks every month.

My body, however, does not update automatically to a one-hour loss in time.

But we should do whatever makes things better, not just consider whatever we could do.

I wonder how long it will take people to complain that it gets dark too soon in summer/it's too dark in the morning in winter.

I understand the frustration and inconveniences that occur with the time changes, but I worry that people voted based on the downsides of the status quo without considering the downsides of the alternatives.

>In the past, academic computer science was useless but practical programmers were good.

At least here in Finland I doubt anyone will even notice the difference.

Here's the fundamental problem:

1. In places far enough from the equator but not too close to the arctic or antarctic (which includes most of the US and Europe), most people want seasonal changes in when things start relative to sunrise.

2. This can be accomplished by changing the clock times of things (e.g., the office opens at 8 AM in winter and at 7 AM in summer), or by changing the clocks (the office opens at 8 AM, and we set the clocks forward an hour in summer and set them back in winter).

3. In the past, changing the clocks was definitely easier than changing the times of things. Times showed up on signs and in print. Changing all of that would be a pain. Clocks, on the other hand, are designed to be easy to change. (Signs could be dealt with by a one time change to show both summer and winter time, but it would probably still cause confusion to people around the date of the switch each year).

The places with static schedule displays are somewhat diminishing now. Many places that would have once been on paper are now only on a website. Many signs are now actually easily changeable electronic displays that simply do not change often. We are getting to a point where changing the times might actually become as easy as changing clocks. But we probably aren't there yet. (On the other hand, clocks are getting easier to change, too, with them often handling it automatically now).

In an earlier discussion here on this, which I got to too late to say anything that would actually be read, I proposed (mostly seriously, but a little bit in jest) a thing I pretentiously named "TZS Time" (name definitely in jest) to address the above issues, and as a side effect also put us in a position to use UTC for coordinating times between time zones while still having an approximation of local time for referring to events in our time zone.

Here was the TZS Time proposal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17887952

One year to change/update all computer systems dealing with time! Have they gone mad? I'd expected at least a few years before this would be implemented, so that society could adjust to this.

Actually, 5-6 months, because EU countries can decide to delay the decision until April.

It's a conspiracy to get consultants contracts!

Why is being an hour behind Arizona a negative? Pacific Time is already an hour behind AZ/Mountain Time during the winter, when you're off DST. California has always been in a different time zone than AZ.

As an Arizonan, I like that we don't have to change our clocks. DST doesn't make sense for us – we don't need more hours of sunlight.

DST leads to subtle bugs. On Android, Google Calendar changes the times of events/appointments of Arizona users when DST starts. It's insane, and they've been doing it for years. They've screwed up so many schedules that I'm surprised there hasn't been a class action suit.

The clocks changing really does mess up my sleep for a good couple of weeks every time. This year I might just ignore the change and continue operating an hour out of phase.

I think this is a step in the good direction, but I think getting rid of the time zones altogether is the right thing to do[0].

[0] https://nationalpost.com/opinion/andrew-coyne-forget-the-day...

There was the EU wide poll wether or not to keep DST. Roughly 80% voted in favor of abandoning DST.

Can someone enlighten me what happened just now and what will happen next? EU Commissioner for Transport Violeta Bulc made some announcement, but did the commission vote/decide on the matter just now? (If not, what is the news in the article?) What are the next steps?

Interesting enough Russia adopted DST changes following Europe in 1981-4 (then as USSR) and finally dropped it in 2014. Looks like a data point for DST efficiency study. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Russia

This is just like the Brexit vote. The populous doesn't know what they are voting for. When they realise all that daylight at 4:30 AM is wasted while they are sleeping it will be too late. As others have mentioned a lot of the DST opponents are confused and actually hate the switch from DST to standard time. I love DST I look forward too it every year.

That's why nearly everyone voted to keep DST year-round. Given that, I don't understand what you're trying to say.

After the DST transition last fall I did some analysis using our dataset at Cronitor: After removing jobs that ran every hour, just a little under 20% of jobs ran twice. Most versions of Crontab handle DST changes correctly but there are a lot of ways to scheduled jobs and this will be a win for a simpler spec creating more reliable systems that are easier to reason about.

In 1984 I had a coworker who booted his Unix workstation and found that the date was Jan 1, 1970. The battery that powered the clock that kept the time when the system was off had died.

He set the time to the correct time.

Cron then tried to start every cron job that would have run between Jan 1, 1970 and the current date in 1984.

That's about 120k instances for every hourly job, 5k instances for every daily job, 700 instances for every weekly job, and a mere 170 instances for every monthly job.

That completely locked up the workstation.

It was hilarious.

My solution for that: Set all servers to UTC and use smearing NTP servers. UTC doesn't have summertime, so the clock doesn't suddenly change and the smearing NTP will prevent leap seconds from doing the same.

Timezones should be accounted for in the UI, not the backend.

Hurray! I'm going to have a Daylight Saming Time party on that day, and there will be no excuse for arriving an hour late or early.

Canceling seasonal time change is a terrible idea. How do I know this with certainty? Because the experiment has already been run. https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/10/30/the-year-daylight-sav...

This was a year round DST. How about having a year round correct time instead?

I don’t understand the reasoning behind getting rid of DST. Why do people find it easier to change office and school times, than to change sleeping times?

Why not sleep from 11-7 in winter, and 10-6 in summer. If you do this, there’s no sleep impact due to DST.

If you can’t make this adjustment, changing office hours will also be impossible.

As a Scandinavian DST gives me little benefits, we have to cope with the huge difference between winter and summer anyway, so having to learn how to handle a sudden jump in time too is just annoying.

Maybe DST is worth the hassle for people in the US and Southern Europe, but as a Scandinavian I am happy it is will be gone.

That site has Ireland's time zone wrong. It's actually GMT+1 with DST in the winter.

In computing, it actually matters.

So let's also switch to the International Fixed Calendar and make it dead simple to reason about time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar

I've never understood people having significant trouble adjusting their sleep schedule by one hour twice per year. Do these people never travel? You don't fly somewhere 3-4 time zones away and stay there for a week and then come home and adjust? I barely even feel a one hour change.

The increased incidence of both heart attacks and car accidents after each time change would indicate that yes, a lot of people have trouble with the change.

> You don't fly somewhere 3-4 time zones away and stay there for a week and then come home and adjust?

No, never. I'm no great traveler, but across 8 countries only one of them was in a different timezone (+1h).

I might be one of a dozen people who enjoys a good 4pm winter sunset or a 10pm summer twilight in Seattle.

It’s stupid to allow countries to select their own zone. If you are enforcing this you might as well just say you are stuck in UTC+1/2/3 and that’s that. You shouldn’t have Bulgaria and Greece be in different time zones. Or am I missing a reason why that would make sense?

> Bulc said EU member states would have until April 2019 to decide whether they would permanently remain on summer or winter time

> "In order to maintain a harmonised approach we are encouraging consultations at national levels to ensure a coordinated approach of all member states," Bulc said.

Why pick a fight before even knowing what every country wants? Maybe they all want winter time or they all want summer time. It sounds like they are talking about that now

And another problem to solve in Spain, I bet you all they haven't reached an agreement by April.

Probably Switzerland will follow. The head of the federal institute of metrology declared in a newspaper that there are good reasons to avoid time differences to neighbouring countries. It will be more difficult to organise traffic (for example railroad traffic).

I am truely astounded by the support to abandon DST. I absolutely love being able to come home and play with my daughter at the beach before it gets dark in summer those are the best times of my life. That extra hour of light is incredible.

In the survey, most people said that they want to keep summer time all year. In Germany, this is what is currently favoured.

You can still start work earlier, or your kids can start school earlier. Workplaces plus schools could have winter timetable.

During this member states could decide to stick to year long summer time. It’s not like winter time is very useful and “noon = sun above head” is not a really useful property of time at this point

The EU should introduce a law that requires the sun to adjust to our time, not the other way around.

Considering the technical expertise of the parliament members, I'd fully expect it to pass.

I hope that nightclubs and parties recalibrate their hours. Now that we have lost an hour of daylight in Summer, we will have to wake up and go to work earlier manually.

If europe goes to all dst it means we won't have the 9AM California/5 pm London meeting time. It'll probably go 8/5 or 9/6 half the year.

Not looking forward to it.

It took years to prepare for the year 2000 transition. Is it really wise to make that transition within several months? There should be plenty of systems that have to be updated.

Timezone updates happen on almost a monthly basis, your computer has a file called the Timezone database which is maintained by a few volunteers. All timezone updates go through there and unless the application you wrote is written by someone who thinks they can do better than everyone involved in time-handling code so far, your application will stop using DST once the EU decides to stop using DST.

What was the y2k transition?

it's certainly not the weirdest thing that has ever been done, the Chinese government has tried to enforce a single time zone across a incredibly wide range of longitude.

And western Chinese have their own unofficial timezone because it's an annoyance.

I never understood why this is such a binary discussion, either wintertime, or +1 hour for summer.

Why not settle right in the middle, +0.5 hour = EU time :)

These should have been new timezones:

  UTC: UK, Faroese, Ireland, Spain, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Portugal, Iceland
  UTC+40' (Hamburg time): Corsica, Germany, Switzerland, Italy (Rome and west), Norway
  UTC+1h (Görlitz time): Austria, Slovenia, Czechia, Croatia, Italy (east of Rome)
  UTC+1h 20' (Krakow time): Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Montenegro, Albania, Sweden
  UTC+1h 40' (Braşov time): Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Lithuania, Finland, Estonia
  UTC+2h: Belarus, Turkey (west of Ankara)
  UTC+2h 30': Turkey (Ankara and east), Cyprus, Ukraine

More timezones but not needing daylight saving.

I'm so confused why everyone is against DST. It is such a benefit to all of my friends who live on farms and do physical labor.

This is going to be terrible to program against

Why?

what a relief ! At long last ! Thank you EU. This should help a lot of people including me sleeping better !

I never understood why the time is not just forwarded an half hour, and then kept there. Best of the 2 worlds

I think having whole-hour timezone offsets is much easier. The only exception is if every nation on earth agrees and shifts by half an hour, which I very much doubt is going to happen: some countries even have regions that do or don't observe DST (such as the USA).

It's funny - we have time, which is this uniform stream of numbers that is ever changing. Then we have the time of day, which is a function that takes the current "time" and formats it for different areas in the world. And instead of placing laws around how the flow of time works, we place laws on how people are allowed to render it and display it.

So, we have to make sure we update our datetime librairies, right?

Programmers, rejoice!

Let's just get the world to UTC already.

Finally some good news out of the EU

If we stayed on a single time zone, my life would be easier.

First, I wouldn't have to avoid starting starting a cron/scheduled job between 1am and 3am -- once a year a 2:30am job may not run, when we skip from 2am to 3am, and once a year a 1:30am job may run twice, when we skip back from 2am to 1am. Your operating system may vary.)

Second, most of the world's database date/time fields are in local time. I hate seeing event volumes double for the fall-back hour, and drop to zero for the spring-forward hour.

TL;DR: date code sucks.

UTC everywhere. No dst, no timezones.

That is impossible. UTC also implies ... Earth and its rotation ;-)

Well, isn't this something. Lots to consider (and I'm behind on all the comments atm.)

I worked in aviation operations for a number of years (prior profession) and lived and breathed UTC.

I wrote this then, so it's ... from last century. (Not in the wayback machine anywhere. I had to dig it back up.)

>>>THE UNIVERSAL CLOCK : EXPLAINED

by The AceyMan

Most anyone who can read a language (as you are doing now) is familiar with 'time' and 'timekeeping'. This short essay hopes to explain the concept of non-local, or universal time, and promote its standardization.

Until 1993, the clock that was set as a reference for all local time zones was kept in the United Kingdom. Due to its position at the Greenwich meridian, it was refered to as 'Greenwich Mean Time', or GMT.

This clock was the world standard for all time zones, and never changes, ie, no savings time, no adjustments, except for accuracy. It is _defined_ as the world standard for time.

So, when a nation or geographical area decides what local time is, they still must have a reference to set it against. (Time is relative, remember). GMT is that standard. For example, in the eastern United States, local (non-daylight) time is 5 hours behind GMT. That is to say, if GMT is 1800 hours (and yes, it uses a 24 hour, or 'military' clock), then US eastern time would be 1300 hours, ie, 1800-500=1300 or 1:00 pm.

Now the confusion with local time occurs mainly when either of two things happens. First, when a person moves from time zone to timezone frequently and must make constant calculations to determine what time it 'really' is, or how long he's been awake, driving, burning fuel, running his computer, accruing hours, charging his customers, or any various other important numbers. This is frequent in transportation, especially aviation, where many time zones may be traversed in a short period.

Second, when one is working with a worldwide communications system and may be talking with persons outside of your local timezone, sometimes FAR OUTSIDE your local time zone. In this case, GMT is especially useful, because by referring to GMT, one can still know what time that person is referring to, without asking where he is.

For example, if you know what GMT is, and I know what GMT is, and I say, "I have to leave to go to a meeting at 1400 GMT", then the other person knows when that person will be leaving. S/he won’t have to ask "well, what's your local time now, so I can figure out how long it is before you go". GMT spares all parties from such time-consuming calculations.

GMT should, and this author hopes WILL BE the clock for the world in the near future, as it should be. We owe the widespread use of global communications, particularly the Internet, for this expectation.

###

I stand by most of that now (but I would do at least one rewrite says older me, heh).

Doing time sums and differences on the fly across multiple time zones is loco. For both fuel and personnel planning. It's not just weather reports and ETD/ETA times. We are crunching time ALL time in air ops, and you have to have a pinned baseline.

I think the time has long past to go unified. Then the only question you have to ask someone is "What's your UTC offset?" E.g., in your .plan file or S4B header text.

Problem handled.

/Acey [edit: unix errata]

Benjamin Franklin's worst idea.

about TIME

Good riddance.

Yay gigantic centralized authorities!

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18009417 and marked it off-topic.

Right. Just do like China and make it all one timezone.

ADDED: </s> in case it wasn't obvious (as was, I'm assuming, the parent).

Good.

Bike shedding at its finest.

Definitely not. Changing clocks has known connections to health risks including traffic fatalities. Lots of people hate it for good reason. A couple of internet searches should be enough to convince you that it's a real issue. If you are unsure of what search terms to try, I suggest "fuck dst"

next thing you know, they'll drop the penny.

First they ban memes. Now the ban changing clocks. What happens if I travel from Spain to Italy. I'd still need to change my clock.

It’s nice when the quasi-democratic corporatocratic union that gave us the cookie laws, the link tax, upload filters, and dieselgate does something useful that will actually improve and simplify many people’s lives. Well done EU!

The EU does a lot to improve peoples lives. You can see the 2018 state of the union here[1].

I particularly like the fact they got rid of all roaming charges, the digital market changes, the digital skills coalition, 30% renewable energy target (especially) and the EU labour authority. Sure, they do some seemingly silly things, but at their scale anyone would.

1. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/sites/beta-political/files/s...

Not a fan of GDPR, I'm assuming? Or wait, is that what you meant by cookie laws?

I've always felt that if you can't handle changing a clock twice a year, then there's probably something fundamentally wrong with your ability to handle much more complex problems. Like deciding what's for lunch.

Well, turning a dial on your wrist or pressing a few buttons is one thing, but when it comes down to code you're looking at a lot more complication than that.

Knowing how to correctly handle time as a programmer is anything but trivial. It's so not-trivial we even have a database of historical changes in timezones and DSTs in order to maintain backwards compatibility for it.

Is that your argument against simplifying things? That people should be able to handle unnecessary complexity?

After years of trial and error, we've determined that the simplest way to change the clock in one of the in-built appliances in our kitchen is to kill its electrical power completely for a few minutes (by tripping the appropriate MCB in the consumer unit), then powering it back up.

When the power is restored, the appliance knows it's experienced a power cut, and asks for the current time.

Yes, this is completely ridiculous. No, I don't know why they designed the UI this way.

You could say the same exact thing with regards to the time on the clock, though. Like, there's no reason that sunrise couldn't be at <arbitrary time>. If we used one worldwide timezone you'd just...wake up at different times depending on where you are instead of it BEING a different time depending on where you are.

I rarely have to deal with changing a clock. The real pain is having to deal with DST and strange timezones while programming.

While I think moving away from daylight saving time (DST) is generally a good thing, but why EU not individual nations? Do nations under EU have no authority to determine whether they observe DST or not? In the US, the federal government does not dictate whether a state observes DST or not.

Right,because when I go shopping in another country 1p minutes from here, I want to have to worry about what time zone they're in... Like in Queensland/NSW, that's just silly there.

A nation could choose to keep DST, but it would be frowned upon as it would hinder the cohesion with other countries. They have no incentives to do so, nobody likes DST on the whole continent.

The US allows states to skip DST but places fairly strict restrictions on it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Time_Act

Individual nations don’t have the weight to do it alone, if Austria decided to go it alone it would be chaos for then. They have authority to do whatever they want, it just doesn’t make sense to do it alone.

The linked article seems to indicate otherwise, but the member states are free to do what they want on this issue.

Because that is the nature of the EU. Although I didn't personally vote for Brexit, it is that kind of thing that made so many people so antagonistic towards it. That and the amount of money shovelled into fuelling this bureaucracy.

Most of the EU's rules and laws have been lobbied for by the industry because the industry loves standardization.

I dont really think this is a good idea. It boils down to when do you want the sun to be up? 4 in the morgning to 21 in the night, or 5 in the morning and 22 in the night? Since the majority of the people like to be up later at night than waking up early, it is better for everyone to turn the clock one hour. Its better for people. Its wellfare.

The clock is turning an hour automaticly any way. Its not a big deal for the clocks, but it is a big deal for the poeple seeing less day light.

There was a survey from EU https://ec.europa.eu/info/consultations/2018-summertime-arra...

and afair over 80% people voted for ending the DST https://uk.blastingnews.com/world/2018/08/eu-to-propose-endi...

Whether is better or not is debatable. Indeed, there are studies that show daylight saving has negative effects on human health. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#Health

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