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.
Mid-day should be the middle of the day. Mid-night should be the middle of the night.
If you like more light in the
eveningmorning go to bed late and wake up late. If you like light in themorningevening, go to bed early and wake up early.Stop fucking with the clocks and making nonsensible decisions
If you like more light in the evening, go to bed late and wake up late.
What about people who are in school or employed?
Mid-day should be the middle of the day. Mid-night should be the middle of the night.
You’d need new clocks, those times drift every day, so 12:00 midday would need to change automatically.
Yeah this comment makes no sense lol who is upvoting this?
There are a lot of regions that are put into the wrong time zone, because that’s easier for business. They’re not even close to 12:00 being the middle of the day especially during DST.
It also depends on your location within your particular time zone. You can’t have noon at the same time of day on both the eastern and western end of the zone.
We aren’t all having the same argument. Solar noon should, indeed, be close to chronological noon, but that will only ever be true in the center of the time zone.
On “standard time” on the western end of a time zone, solar noon is (ostensibly) 11:30 am, while on the eastern end, it’s 12:30. Under DST, those times shift to 12:30 and 13:30, respectively. In zones wider than 15 degrees, there can be more than an hour difference.
When the eastern end of the zone argues for permanent Standard Time, and the western end of the zone argues for permanent DST, both ends are arguing for the same preference.
“Midday” (solar noon) should indeed be close to noon, but midday should never be before 12:00pm.
The solution is to lock the clocks on one system or the other, and allow political subdivisions to move the line so their clocks work best for them.
Yes, but the EU is split into four time zones now and if you implement this technically there would be many more:
8 if we’d have 30-min time-zones 16 if we’d have 15-min time-zones 24 if we’d have 10-min time-zones 48 if we’d have 5-min time-zones 240 if we’d have 1-min time-zones
I’m not saying we should keep dst, but we can’t have everyone have midday at 12:00 and midnight at 00:00.
You can keep 1 hour time zones just fine. It still puts noon within 1 hour of mid day, which you don’t get with DST.
I can accept that. So long as after we lock the clocks on standard time, my region is allowed to switch to the next time zone to the west.
I don’t think the “noon = midday” argument is complete. I think noon should be close to, but never before midday. Midday should never occur at 11:30 AM, like it currently does on the western ends of the zones.
If you are arguing for permanent standard time and you are on the eastern end of your time zone, you are making the same argument as someone advocating DST from the western end.
If you like more light in the evening, go to bed late and wake up late. If you like light in the morning, go to bed early and wake up early.
Other way around. If you want a lighter evening, your day has to slide earlier so when you sleep is closer to sunset.
Tell my employer that.
This but unironic. Employers just do what everyone is doing, and will stop when everyone else does.
You’re more likely to win the euromillion than to successfully shift norms away from the 8:30-18:00 working hours. This shit is baked into every employment contract out there. I work an office job where it doesn’t matter so much, but anyone who works shifts or a time-sensitive job is stuck there basically forever regardless of the time zone.
This is the way
We need a standard system for tracking time. If every city decides their own time based on the sun it will be chaos.
Have the whole world go on UTC, that way there’s never confusion.
I’ve had way too many conversations with people that simply can’t comprehend how that works. “But then we’d have to do everything so much earlier, it would be dark all the time.” I try to explain that we’d still do everything at the same time of day, just call it something different, but they just can’t wrap their minds around that.
We can’t. It’d make it too easy to discover how arbitrary “9 to 5” is.
While we’re at it, cancel the time zones. I have no fucking clue why we’re still pretending everyone wakes up at the same time of the day all over the world. All it does is mess up scheduling for when you actually want to talk to people on the other side of the world.
How would we decide to handle the date with no time zones? Half the world would have a date switch during the daytime. Not necessarily impossible to navigate but it would be confusing for a while.
That is up to the people to decide. Have the date switch at 00:00 whenever that is, or switch it at whatever time is the middle of the night - I just want to be able to see the time written out and be able to tell how many hours from now that’s happening without googling what flavor of time fuckery any specific time zone abbreviation means. I don’t think changing dates is going to be more confusing than some countries having 15 minutes ahead of GMT time zones or screwing up everyone’s circadian rhythms twice a year.
That’s going to be way worse. I can get down with no timezones, but if we replace time zones with date zones you’ll end up with two locations where the same instant of time is either March 2nd at 3am or March 1st at 3am. There really just isn’t an easy way to handle time that works for all weird geographies and also makes it easy to schedule things across an ocean. But also, fuck daylight savings, that’s a totally unnecessary way of making it all worse than it needs to be.
I will never understand why people want the time we only use for 3 months to be the time we use for the whole year. I would rather people just be able to admit that December is dark (for the northern hemisphere) and we can do shit at a different time.
I literally couldn’t care less which time we pick, I just want the madness to STOP
wdym 3 months? both CET and CEST are used approximately half a year
In North America DST is used from second Sunday of March until first Sunday of November.
This means there are 239 days in DST, and 126 days out of DST in 2025. Close to 2 to 1 ratio.
I know it’s different with CEST and CET, and it sucks even more donkeyballs there, when the sun sets around 4PM (instead of 5) regardless.
DST should really be the standard in most places. You want more sunlight in the afternoon, not in the morning.
Yep, the “standard” time should definitely be what we currently call daylight saving.
I completely agree. Plus, it gives everyone an hour of light that would otherwise be wasted working.
To people thinking of enforcing UTC around the globe:
obligatory: https://qntm.org/abolish
Before I read this article, I also thought it would be a great idea to get rid of timezones entirely and just use UTC for everything. To quote from the link,
Abolishing time zones brings many benefits, I hope. It also:
- causes the question “What time is it there?” to be useless/unanswerable
- necessitates significant changes to the way in which normal people talk about time
- convolutes timetables, where present
- means “days” (of the week) are no longer the same as “days”
- complicates both secular and religious law
- is a staggering inconvenience for a minimum of five billion people
- makes it near-impossible to reason about time in other parts of the world
- does not mean everybody gets up at the same time, goes to work at the same time, or goes to bed at the same time
- is not simpler.
As long as humans live in more than one part of the world, solar time is always going to be subjective. Abolishing time zones only exacerbates this problem.
(copied from one of my 9-month old comments)
I mean the best refute of it I’ve ever heard is that the date changes in the middle of the day, and that sounds miserable
UTC all around the world is a completely different thing than UTC (or UTC+1) all over Europe. China also spans just over three natural timezones and they get by just fine with one.
they get by just fine with one.
China spans five geographic time zones and it does cause some pain to those living far away from Beijing. It’s not a great system.
Because Beijing should be using Chongqing time, yes, then the offset of clock noon to natural noon would be at most something like ±1.5 hours.
I advocate for UTC everywhere. So far I’m always dismissed as a joke.
Because time doesn’t really matter in any of those situations.
You still need to know all that information.
Since for most people and most of the world the normal life follows a fairly daylight centred rhythm that is something that’s sensible to use as a common basis.
Yes but
It makes programming hard
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 :)
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.
Split the difference at 30 minutes, and call it a day!
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.
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 that 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.
Ok, how many analogue clocks does everyone have?
I’ve heard a few complaints today from people irl about having to change their clocks. Not about the time change itself, but having to change the time on clocks. It took me two minutes lol.
My eyes are tired, billy
It’s 6 am but is it really
Whether it’s 5 or 6 or 7, it’s too early.
I have not changed the clock for like 10 years or more. All my clocks are synchronized and the oven/microwave clock will permanently be a 00:00, I don’t have time set it every time lights go out…
I live in a non-DST area and it is very nice
like 2 times every year we change our time. world news!
I mean, yeah. It’s a stressful thing that kills a lot of people. It’s newsworthy.
No one is complaining about when we all gain an hours sleep in Autumn
I have never liked it.
As a person, I don’t like the inconsistency.
As a developer, I don’t like to not be able to use the local time as a consistent way to order data.
As a father, I don’t like to have to adjust a daily routine of my baby who has just reached a good 24 hour schedule.
I do. I can’t stand it because where I live it means I will no longer see the sun. Not to even mention how much it sucks ass from a mental standpoint to get out of work and have it be dark. I could not care less if I see a tiny bit of sunlight on my way to work lol. I’ve had multiple jobs where once ST hits, I’m going to work and coming home in darkness. I literally dont see the sun until the weekend. Imo give me whichever option that maximizes sunlight during most people’s free time.
You hate standard time
DST moves the sun an hour later in the day
I hate the sun.
Fuck that yellow bastard.
give me whichever option that maximizes sunlight during most people’s free time
That’s not changed by adjusting clocks, it’s changed by adjusting work hours.
I’m kind of the opposite, lol.
I miss my overnight shift.
I’d wake up, the world was quiet, there were no harsh lights to contend with, very few coworkers to deal with, even less management…
Just go in, put in my earbuds between calls, and do my shit. Then, when everyone is grumpy and trying to get coffee, I’m going home.
That being said, when the time changed it could be a blessing and a curse.
On one hand, sweet, short(ish) day… well, 11 hours. Then it swings the other way, and 13 hour shifts suck even more than 12 hours.
Watching the time roll back an hour feels very unfair when you’re on the clock and just want to go home, lol.
Who are all these people waking up at a fixed time on the clock on a Sunday morning? Some people have to work of course but me working a weekday 9-5, my wake up times on the weekend can vary a huge amount.
Putting out a fire you started feels like doing hero’s work.
You dont gain an hour’s sleep.
How come?
A rose is a rose and time is time. That “extra hour” can be taken any time you want and has nothing to do with changing a clock twice a year. You’re going to sleep however mych you want or need to regardless of this construct. Also you “lose” that hour in spring
I wish I could sleep however much I want or need. That sounds lovely.
Ah yeah, fair point. I didn’t consider that option
You’ll trade one day of one extra hour of sleep for increased misery all winter long?
Well no, because if you remove DST you’d go for the time zone where noon means the sun is straight up. That’s the winter schedule, so you summer evenings get an hour shorter.
If we get rid of DST everybody needs to start work an hour earlier IMHO.
Anything for more light in the winter evening. I generally go to work when it’s dark and come home when it’s dark. It really fucks up my mental health. I honestly don’t know how many more winters I can handle, this was a rough one.
