Comment by elihu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elihu | Hacker News Reader

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.

And then some idiots do a referendum and the state ends up voting itself out of the union?

>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...

I've never been abroad during a daylight savings time switchover, and according to the map on the page you link to I have been to a couple countries that don't do daylight savings at all.

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