EU Parliament Votes To End Daylight Savings (dw.com) 220
The European Parliament on Tuesday voted with a large majority to end daylight savings time in the EU by 2021. From a report: Under the proposals, each member state would decide whether to continue with twice-a-year clock changes or stick permanently to summer or winter time. All 28 member states would need to inform the European Commission of their choice ahead of the proposed switch, by April 2020. They would then coordinate with the bloc's executive so that their decisions do not disrupt the functioning of the single market.
Yay but nay (Score:5, Insightful)
One Thing was that DST was created to save energy, but was not adopted by all countries in the beginning. It was only back in 1996 whole of EU got DST standardized so all member would change clocks on the same dates.
But now we are heading back into the chaos, where each member can decide which ever time they will implement. So we are back to pre-1996.
Re:Yay but nay (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, get rid of daylight savings by all means but whatever the choice is make it uniform!
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The EU is to big to have on timezone, if you mean that with "uniform".
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The EU is to big to have on timezone
Right, but they can be told to stay on winter time, which makes the most sense for a large part of the central european timezone.
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They tried though, with the Central European Time zone, which is, indeed, too large - France and Spain should be in the Western European Time zone.
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Re:Yay but nay (Score:4, Funny)
Stop thinking that we somehow need to regulate our clocks to that yellow thing
Right, we should all work 9-5 on UTC time, and if that means you work and play in the dark, and go to sleep in the light, so be it. Stop thinking that you need the sun to enjoy a nice day on the beach, or a hike in the mountains, when you can simply bring some flashlights with you.
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Why MUST work start at 9 and end at 5?
Re: Yay but nay (Score:2)
Because you want to know if the Sales department of Company B is open. So everyone in the same area has to be keeping reasonably close to the same hours. I'll wait an hour for you to open, but not four.
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A difference of one hour is not a big deal. And circadian rhythms are a thing until brain uploading is invented so we are definitely not past that.
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The EU is to big to have on timezone, if you mean that with "uniform".
Earth Standard Time. One time zone.
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Can't make that work. Unless you can persuade some people to be fine with the fact that it will be twelve noon and pitch black outside for them.
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Why not? It's just a number. Everyone just switch to a 24hr UTC clock... it isn't like you don't have the existing offsets as a guide to get started. It would be an annoying transition but it is still consistent from day to day so you'd adjust pretty quickly.
There are advantages and downsides but the advantages of all having the same clock are pretty substantial especially given how globally connected everyone is. Arranging a meeting with someone in the UK or France? You just set a time and everyone will au
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No more missed meetings improper timing because of timezone conversion
But instead you'll have missed meeting because you scheduled it at a time the other party wasn't in the office.
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If you don't ask when they're in the office, your meeting is going to fail anyway. You don't know when they start and stop work, and you don't know when they take their lunch hour, whether they're across the street or across the globe.
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"Can't make that work. Unless you can persuade some people to be fine with the fact that it will be twelve noon and pitch black outside for them."
Just tell them is not twelve noon anymore but 19 noon, seven hours more noon than ever. Problem ended.
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Not much you can do about it when daylight is only a couple of hours long.
Only a handful of people live where such conditions apply. There's a reason for that. Good luck imposing those conditions on people who never agreed to live under them.
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You do know the clock is just a coordinated number and it doesn't actually impact the number of hours of light? If you go to work at 8am now and the clock changes to something else, you'll still go to work, sleep, eat meals, etc at the same points in your local sun cycle. If we adapted EST from 24hr UTC you'd just apply your current offset to find the new times and work from there. Nothing would change but the number on the display. You could use your existing alarm clock without change to wake up for work
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Yes, we are. And this habit is so ingrained, and so baked into all our systems, that it's not going to be changed. The majority of people's work days are going to start at 9 AM, even when that means that 9 AM can't be the same moment in time across the globe.
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We basically have that with Coortinated Universal Time (UTC). The problem is that, were I to follow this time, I'd be getting up at 1am local time (6am UTC), working from 3am to 11am local time (8am to 4pm UTC), and going to sleep at 6pm local time (11pm UTC). As sunrise tends to be at around 6:30am local time, my day would be a third over before the sun even rose.
You're not going to convince many people to follow this schedule.
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Using UTC doesn't fix anything, because everybody will still have totally different schedules and office hours. And without official timezones, every business can decide for itself, which will cause a lot more confusion and chaos.
Re:Yay but nay (Score:4, Informative)
If you were right, it would cause the end of all rush hour traffic congestion, which would be wonderful.
But back in the real world, most businesses are going to set their hours to be daylight hours since that's when their customers and employees will want to be awake. And back in the real world every business already decides for themselves what their hours are. Many people start work at 7, 8, 9am with no real dominant standard starting time. People talk as "9 to 5" were a standard, but the mean work start time is actually 8:18 (in USA+Europe, source [cbsnews.com]). Which is why it's really more like rush 3 hours instead of rush hour. Clock time really has zilch current influence on when employers set their working hours right now, it would not change if we went to UTC.
Re:Yay but nay (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is not the times you do stuff - it's that for half the worl, the date would suddenly change in the middle of the day. "It's my birthday! But only from 1pm today to 1pm the next day" fails a basic sanity check - the notion of 'today' becomes bunk.
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My birthday would begin about when I get home from work. I could celebrate at home, sleep, go to work and enjoy a birthday lunch at work.
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You're obviously not clear on the concept. If you currently work 8-16 local time, which is offset -5 from UTC, a change to UTC simply means you would work 13-20 UTC.
How can you possibly argue that you'd work 8-16 UTC when you don't now?
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"We basically have that with Coortinated Universal Time (UTC). The problem is that, were I to follow this time, I'd be getting up at 1am local time (6am UTC), working from 3am to 11am local time (8am to 4pm UTC), and going to sleep at 6pm local time (11pm UTC). As sunrise tends to be at around 6:30am local time, my day would be a third over before the sun even rose.
You're not going to convince many people to follow this schedule."
Why would you do that? Since you get up at 6am now in your example with a -5 o
Re: Yay but nay (Score:2)
If we are going to move to just one time coordinate, I would seriously hope we would get rid of that am/pm bullshit too. A 24 hour clock is way more logical than two 12 hour clocks.
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Uniform, as in a single election for all 28 members, either use daylight savings or don't and whether to use winter or summer time. Otherwise you'll have some which stick with daylight savings and some who don't and possibly inconsistency with regard to winter or summer time.
That said, switching everyone (globally) over to a 24hr UTC clock and getting over mental hangups about sucking up the minor adjustment of what "morning" means for you would be much better overall. You know what is much better than bei
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We already have a standard for specifying a time in absolute terms. Just use it when scheduling an event across time zones and all is well. No need for anyone to change their clocks or anything. If you're unsure if someone might be in a different time zone or observe summer time differently, use parentheses. For example, conference call is at 1:45 P.M. ( 17:45 UTC).
And nobody had to change a clock or anything.
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How ironic, since this area of the world is where we find the Coordinated Universal Time zone, also known as Zulu time.
"Zulu time"? Thas raysis! Surely for this politically correct world we need to abbreviate Coordinated UNiversal Time with an acronym, instead!
Re: Yay but nay (Score:5, Informative)
Technically, GMT is NOT the same as UTC. There are actually three different standards... GMT, UTC, and TAI.
They differ because the precise length of an orbital & rotational year is neither 100% consistent nor predictable.
GMT is defined by solar noon at the Greenwich Observatory in London. If observation reveals that we've wobbled by a few milliseconds, GMT changes to reflect that. It sounds nice in theory, but 99.999% of use cases honestly don't give a fuck whether solar noon at Greenwich happens a few hundred milliseconds (or entire seconds) early or late.
TAI is kind of like Unix time, except it has much greater precision. It defines a second as a precise number of cesium-137 decay periods, a year as a precise number of seconds, and counts both as an offset from its starting point. TAI currently deviates from GMT by ~32 seconds.
UTC was envisioned as a compromise between GMT and TAI. It adds and removes seconds to ensure that UTC's noon falls within a half second of Greenwich solar noon. It's also a royal pain in the ass to deal with, because unlike TAI, UTC is a historical moving target. 9:47:42 July 18, 1997 UTC is NOT precisely 8 years before 9:47:42 July 18, 2005 UTC (even accounting for leap year gymnastics), because a couple of seconds were added as well
UTC makes a mess of things like timestamped logs, the same way DST does... but worse, because most people using UTC for timestamps are doing it PRECISELY to avoid the DST timestamp problem, and have no idea that "leap seconds" even EXIST until the first time they get burned by it.
UTC-vs-TAI was exacerbated by the sudden popularity of using internet time protocol (NTP) to automatically set clocks on computers. In the past, people set the time, and let it go until they manually updated it at their own convenience. Leap seconds were rare to begin with during that era, and a second or two gain or loss when the computer got rebooted was lost in the greater disruption of the reboot itself.
Fast forward to sometime around 2006, when UTC-via-NTP had become commonplace, and a leap second occurred, Linux computers all automatically observed it, and all hell broke loose when software that assumed that "UTC" behaved like TAI found itself with 2 seconds' worth of logged activity bearing the same timestamp (and often, undefined weirdness if computations involving milliseconds were involved on computers that did 64-bit timekeeping).
As I understand the "Linux" problem, programmers want TAI-like behavior, but POSIX compliance explicitly requires UTC... switching Linux to TAI would require changes to POSIX to allow timestamps to unambiguously indicate whether they're UTC or TAI, and the current 32-second difference is too big to just sweep under a rug and ignore. So instead, we have a complicated system where computers use NTP to sync up to TAI, then the OS converts TAI to UTC and adds/removes leap seconds before exposing it as the leap-second-mangled offset from midnight January 1, 1970 for consumption by programs that don't actually CARE about the precise moment of solar noon @ Greenwich.
The proposed solution is almost worse... ending leap seconds in UTC (to avoid rewriting POSIX & everything it dictates, causing YEARS of insidious bugs in the process), and inventing a FOURTH standard to do what UTC currently does & keep astronomers happy.
Compounding matters even more is disagreement about how to handle the leap seconds we already have. If UTC retroactively wipes them out, we're back to the problem of ambiguity with "UTC" timestamps between the 1980s and present... no way to indicate whether it's a "legacy" UTC timestamp or a "revised" one. If it doesn't, we'll still have to deal with those legacy timestamps in perpetuity.
The net result is that we're likely stuck with UTC and dealing with leap seconds in Linux for at least another decade or two. My guess is that POSIX will be left alone, UTC will eventually stop adding leap seconds (but leave the existing ones as-is), and they'll come up with a new standard for Astronomers to take the place of UTC.
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Yes, and the same would be true if we globally all agreed to just use a 24hr UTC standard. I don't know why people have a hard time seeing that they will more or less be doing things at the same time of day as now and the only thing being discussed is what number a clock should display when they do it.
With everything more and more globally connected, especially business, it would be a huge benefit to automatically all know what time an event set for 08:00 is, regardless of where we happen to be located.
Social benefit (Score:2)
One Thing was that DST was created to save energy, but was not adopted by all countries in the beginning.
Energy savings might have been a goal originally but that goal seems to be largely a failure or at least any benefits seem marginal. However DST does have the positive social benefit of maximizing daylight hours in the evening when it's of benefit to the majority of people. For various reasons the middle of our daylight hours no longer matches people's schedule. For most people the middle of their day is somewhere around 1-2pm. Most adults go to bed sometime between 9-11pm and they finish work some time
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So we might finally end this, but only repeat history and head back into the chaos.
Au contraire! I have it on good authority from Slashdotters near and far that the only ill effect of the switch is that so few people will die, overpopulation is inevitable.
Personally, I hope that each country adopts a different time, and we can sit back and watch that chaos. Popcorn will be my treat
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It may have made sense in the past, when lighting was the main use of electricity.
Nowdays with efficient LAD and fluorescent lights and many more uses for electric power, it doesn't save anything.
And you can add in the fact that a lesser proportion of the people these days work 9-5
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Re:Yay but nay (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yay but nay (Score:4, Insightful)
Time zones make sense as you don't want my clock to be 5 minutes different than your time but the time itself should be set based on some concept of sunrise, sunset, or high noon. What you are really asking is "what time of day is it in X?" or even "will so-in-so be awake / at work?" If we just set people's timezone where 7am is always the approximate time of sunrise then this would answer this question fine and businesses can set schedules appropriately. Many businesses already have summer and winter hours so daylight savings time does nothing but complicates the communication.
The different lengths of days doesn't really matter that much either as people still tend to be awake for the same number of hours regardless of season and if we are talking international, Australia has short days during the same time that Europe has long days. Better to just pick the timezone where your true sunrise is the closest to 7am and be done with it.
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but the time itself should be set based on some concept of sunrise, sunset, or high noon.
But that is exactly the problem. Unless you live exactly on the equator the sun doesn't rise/set at the same time each day. For example where I live we are now heading into spring/summer, so the sun comes up about 1 minute earlier than the day before. After a month, sun rise is a whole 30 minutes ahead. By the time this pattern shifts and I start loosing a minute (when heading into fall and winter) the sun is coming up at least an hour and a half earlier than it did before. So unless you reset your cl
Re:Yay but nay (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, let's abolish time zones so we have no way of knowing whether the guys in the offices in California, New York, London, and Tokyo are at work or not! That will fix ALL the chaos in our global community!
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California, New York, London, and Tokyo are at work or not!
Each office has posted hours, those hours would be the same as the ones on your watch, no matter where you were in the world. No more having to think, well it's 5:00pm here in California right now, so that's -7GMT (standard time zone rules apply, -8GMT a month ago), Tokyo is +9GMT, so that means Tokyo is 16 hours ahead. 5:00pm is really 17:00; and 17:00 + 16 hours = 33:00; 33:00 is tomorrow; so subtract 24:00 to get 9:00. So it's 9:00am tomorrow in Tokyo, so yes they probably just opened there because I
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Each office has posted hours, those hours would be the same as the ones on your watch, no matter where you were in the world. No more having to think, well it's 5:00pm here in California right now, so that's -7GMT (standard time zone rules apply, -8GMT a month ago), Tokyo is +9GMT, so that means Tokyo is 16 hours ahead. 5:00pm is really 17:00; and 17:00 + 16 hours = 33:00; 33:00 is tomorrow; so subtract 24:00 to get 9:00. So it's 9:00am tomorrow in Tokyo, so yes they probably just opened there because I know they open around 8:00am Tokyo time.
So you do a double conversion, where one moment you have to think about what time the sun rises, then next you have to GMt time and compare the two.
Dayum - how is your plan for the higher latitudes going to work out? Some days you can't call bewcause the sun never comes up, and others it si daylight 24/7, so you can call any time. And constantly changing, you'll hhave to look up the sunrise sunset tables for any place.
But then I guess the earth is flat, and all of these differences are just some libe
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"Yeah, let's abolish time zones so we have no way of knowing whether the guys in the offices in California, New York, London, and Tokyo are at work or not! That will fix ALL the chaos in our global community!"
I live in Spain, and I've worked at the same time with people in India and Americas. The way to know if my colleagues were working or not has always been the same: ask. It is not only that I should memorize (or look at) about five different timezones but also that the job schedules were not the same:
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but the time itself should be set based on some concept of sunrise, sunset, or high noon.
But that is exactly the problem. Unless you live exactly on the equator the sun doesn't rise/set at the same time each day.
I think most slashdotters don't really care, because what is Sunset and Sunrise when you are living in Mom's basement?
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Then we'd all know what time it was everywhere. No need to convert. If we actually needed information like "what time is dinner, what time do you start work, etc", we could just ask those questions.
#NoDST #NoTimezones
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That is the fundamental problem. People want 7 am to match with sunrise year-round. But it's impossible to do that astronomically. There's no way to maintain sunrise at 7 am, and simultaneously have 24 hour days. The time of sunrise varies with your latitude, and with the time of year (and to a smaller extent, with your longitude w
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Time zones make sense as you don't want my clock to be 5 minutes different than your time but the time itself should be set based on some concept of sunrise, sunset, or high noon. What you are really asking is "what time of day is it in X?" or even "will so-in-so be awake / at work?" If we just set people's timezone where 7am is always the approximate time of sunrise then this would answer this question fine and businesses can set schedules appropriately. Many businesses already have summer and winter hours so daylight savings time does nothing but complicates the communication.
So if I want to know what time it is in Australia, all I have to do is call someone there and ask if the sun is up.
And Why don't you check with the higher latitudes and tell them that 7 A.M. is their average sunrise? Or is your world one where you only do business with peopel 100 miles away or less? Has Slashdot gone over to the flat earthers?
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The problem with that is that we don't go to bed and wake up at equal times before and after noon.
Permanent DST is a mistake as well. (Score:3, Insightful)
There is a standard, and it's called solar noon. Aim for that, and then adjust your schedule accordingly rather than pretend that the clock must decide your schedule.
States having inconsistent times across longitude (or even incrementing inconsistently across latitude) will be a bigger mess.
Re: Permanent DST is a mistake as well. (Score:3)
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I'm guessing people would rather keep it that way - and most likely on DST (summer) time
Permanent DST sucks for Spain in the winter.
Berliners can start enjoying the morning light at 3 am during mid-summer (sunrise would be at 3:43am without DST).
3 am or 4 am sunrise hardly makes a difference if you want to sleep until 7 or 8 am. Get some good curtains if the light bothers you.
Re: Permanent DST is a mistake as well. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't so much that the sunlight interfers with your sleep, as you waste daylight hours asleep and then are active after sunset in the dark. It's better if you get up earlier and have more daylight at the end of the day, hence, daylight savings time. I've particularly noticed this advantage as I've gotten older and my night vision has deteriorated; I very much appreciate having daylight to see by in the evenings.
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The problem isn't so much that the sunlight interfers with your sleep, as you waste daylight hours asleep and then are active after sunset in the dark. It's better if you get up earlier and have more daylight at the end of the day, hence, daylight savings time
I see. In that case, I fully agree. That's why I would prefer to keep what we have now. Reasonable sunrise in the winter, and later sunset in the summer, when the early light is not useful.
Re: Permanent DST is a mistake as well. (Score:2)
I would rather see daylight at least once per day in winter: make it double DST please! There's a point as you go further north from London where even this doesn't work though.
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Permanent DST sucks for Spain in the winter.
Agreed. Permanent DST makes no sense.
I always thought Spain would be in WET ? Maybe it's just is in the wrong time zone ? Why not take the opportunity and fix that too by switching from CET to WET and enjoy noon at midday ?
Btw: I just recently had the pleasure to try to fit the tzdata file into an embedded system with 1MB flash. I nearly went crazy sifting through the data. We couldn't do it anyway and had to settle for a compromise.
Every person that has to do with software has to encourage any attempt t
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I always thought Spain would be in WET ? Maybe it's just is in the wrong time zone ? Why not take the opportunity and fix that too by switching from CET to WET and enjoy noon at midday ?
That's where it's supposed to be, but I guess they adopted CET for economic reasons, i.e. more overlapping business hours with trade partners.
Definitely want permanent DST (Score:3)
Agreed. Permanent DST makes no sense.
Disagree. Permanent standard time makes no sense. I want maximal daylight in the evening when it is actually useful to the most people including myself. That means DST year round makes more sense.
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I want maximal daylight in the evening when it is actually useful to the most people including myself
So, you want daylight between noon and midnight ?
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I always thought Spain would be in WET ? Maybe it's just is in the wrong time zone ? Why not take the opportunity and fix that too by switching from CET to WET and enjoy noon at midday ?
They should be, but some guy named Franco changed it to be the same timezone as Germany in 1941 for some reason.
Permanent DST is the best choice (Score:3)
There is a standard, and it's called solar noon. Aim for that, and then adjust your schedule accordingly rather than pretend that the clock must decide your schedule.
Evidently you've never had an actual job because companies are mostly quite inflexible about the hours they expect you to work. They aren't going to collectively coordinate to change their hours of operation for your personal convenience. Easier to change the clock than to convince everyone to voluntarily change their hours of operation.
Solar noon is an arbitrary decision about timekeeping. It has no inherent causal relationship to human activity schedules. We can just as easily define 11am or 1pm to be
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and it's called solar noon. Aim for that
Why? What makes your arbitrary choice any better than anyone else's arbitrary choice? Also how many timezones can we split the world by? The sun isn't at its peak at noon here, it is somewhere within our timezone, but not here. So what are the error bars on your arbitrary decision?
and then adjust your schedule accordingly rather than pretend that the clock
You don't live in our reality do you. Or do you understand why the concept of a clock was developed in the first place?
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Timezones are pointless, let's all just use UTC.
Anybody who wants to use UTC can already do that. I would highly recommend it for internal events or appointments. It's a shitty idea to force UTC for domestic times, though.
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*international* events.
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Fine. In San Diego at this time of year, it would make sunrise at 1:40 PM and sunset at 4 AM. Good luck talking them into that schedule.
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Why? In a couple of months it will seem normal that that's what the clock reads when you wake up. It's just a number.
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And they'll argue that what we do now ALREADY seems normal and nobody even has to list a finger!
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Which is fine, let's just stops changing it every few months when we're just getting used to the new number again!
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> The people who advocate "permanent DST" meant to say they want to switch to the next time zone to the east.
You DO realize that there are places of the world where the time zone DOESN'T change, right? They effectively are on "permanent DST" such as Arizona, Hawaii, etc.
It is fucking stupid to constantly be changing the clocks. It is far less disruptive to be just consistent.
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You DO realize that there are places of the world where the time zone DOESN'T change, right? They effectively are on "permanent DST" such as Arizona, Hawaii, etc.
You do realize that places closer to the equator don't have so much yearly variation in sunrise/sunset times as places closer to the poles ? Whatever works in Arizona doesn't necessarily work just as well in Norway.
You have that backwards (Score:2)
You DO realize that there are places of the world where the time zone DOESN'T change, right? They effectively are on "permanent DST" such as Arizona, Hawaii, etc.
You have that backwards. They are permanently NOT on DST. They are on standard time year round. DST gets you an extra hour of daylight in the evening. No state in the USA is legally permitted to be on DST all year under current law. Standard time is what we get in the winter. DST is the act of advancing clocks forward an hour in the summer.
End DST? I think not. (Score:4, Insightful)
No, allowing each member State to decide whether to have permanent Standard Time, permanent Summer Time, or continue to switch as always is NOT "ending DST".
If you want to end DST, then you need to find a set of choices that does NOT include "change clocks twice a year"....
Why not split the difference? (Score:4, Interesting)
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I'd like to point out that had DST never been invented in the first place, we would have all gone about our lives, never given it a second thought, and lived happily ever after. But because we spent a few decades clinging to this ridiculous practice, now we have a debate.
Everybody hates it (Score:4, Insightful)
What problem does it solve? If any? Ditch it and save the time, money and hassle. I've been to places that have better things to worry about. Not just tropical places where the length of the day doesn't vary anyway, but also Arizona (UTC-7 all year) and Saskatchewan (UTC-6 all year).
Everybody hates it. Why is it taking so long?
...laura
Retail (Score:2)
Re:Everybody hates it (Score:4, Insightful)
If we move to permanent DST, my sunrise will be around 10 am in the winter. I'll hate that more than spending a few minutes changing the clocks.
Too fucking bad.
I'll take dark mornings over having my body clock changed twice a year.
Re:Everybody hates it (Score:4, Insightful)
Really, 1 hour is nothing to adjust to... it takes all of a couple of days if anything. If you think adjusting an hour twice a year is bad, I guess you never travel to another timezone. Nothing is more hellish than being 5+ or 10+ hours off your internal clock, yet people do it frequently and the body will adjust soon enough.
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Numerous studies show this causes an increase in accidents, heart attacks, and, yes, even deaths
That's only true if you focus on the couple of days right after the change. If you measure over the whole year, accidents get reduced, and heart attacks stay the same (people who get a heart attack because of a 1 hour time change would get the heart attack anyway, just at a later time)
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This is a good argument for year round DST.
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This just in: People who die because of something would die later anyway, so it doesn't matter.
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Just contact your reps and let them know you prefer permanent standard time then. It doesn't really matter which just stop changing the time ever 6 to 8 months.
Permanent DST for the win! (Score:2)
If we move to permanent DST, my sunrise will be around 10 am in the winter. I'll hate that more than spending a few minutes changing the clocks.
So what? It also means you'll have an hour of extra daylight at the end of the day and that is more useful to most people. I get up, drive to work and spend the next 8-10 hours indoors. Most people do something similar. I don't give a shit if it is pitch black out until I'm ready to leave work for the day. Give me the daylight when I can do something useful with it.
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It also means you'll have an hour of extra daylight at the end of the day and that is more useful to most people
I like it a bit more balanced. Extra daylight at the end of the day is nice, but not at the cost of a morning commute in total darkness. In the winter it's too cold to enjoy the outdoors in the evening anyway.
I don't give a shit if it is pitch black out until I'm ready to leave work for the day
What about the days you don't work ? You want to go walk in the park on a sunday morning in darkness ? What if you have a job as a landscaper or construction worker or another outside job, and you have to work in the dark ?
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If you live in a place where you only get 4 hours of sunlight in the winter (noon +/- 2 hours) and you don't want to wake up in the dark, then the correct solution is to adjust your local business hours in winter to start with the local sunrise. Forcing everyone - even those living in places which get 6, 8, 10, or 12 hours of sunlight in the winter - to change their business start time to match your local sunrise isn't just wrong.
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Forget no DST or permanent DST.
The easy reference should be midnight and noon.
Midnight should roughly be halfway between sunset and sunrise.
Noon should roughly be halfway between sunrise and sunset.
For PDT (DST in CA, US), right now, midday and midnight are at 12, which is why permanent DST make sense on the west coast.
EU parliament votes to end daylight savings (Score:2)
Unfortunately, because of a new law recently passed, nobody in the world can learn more about this.
Slashdot owes money (Score:2)
Weird (Score:2)
I thought daylight savings was only a US thing. Hopefully we can abolish it soon too.
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All or nothing (Score:2)
I hate the time changes but it may be going a little too far to completely abolish it everywhere. At high lattitudes, it does make a certain amount of sense. Daylight at 9:00pm really is more useful than daylight at 4:00am.
The problem has been politicians doing it for show (2005 US Congress, and a bunch of weak-willed Canadian politicans who followed suit for no reason) for locations where the benefits were minor if not outright imaginary.
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If you really believe that evening daylight is more useful, I suggest you do some reading on the impact of daylight on serotonin and melatonin cycles, and why the timing of such exposure is important.
DST needs to go away... but permanent standard time is really the
Split the Difference - 30 minutes in the middle !! (Score:3)
I hate the time change. It does NOT save energy (I never understood that argument). I live near the 45th parallel and it is damn dark in the morning & afternoon during the winter. Around here the excuse is to have light in the morning to make school bus pickup safer - see the reason isn't even universal. Experience says, it don't make much difference. The bus comes around 6:50am and the sun doesn't rise until 7:30. And for those in Seattle or Montreal its even worse(8 am?! holy-moly). But its fast period in the middle of December and January, a big difference is noticed by Feb. Longer nights in the summer promotes business (outdoor events, concerts on the green etc).
And summer time - The sun is up by a bit after 5 and sets around 9, we still have light at 10pm. A plenty long day.
So - why not split the difference by 30 minutes. We get "30" minutes of extra light in the winter. And it doesn't make a difference in the summer. I'd hate to have summer sunset occur before 8pm with a whole-sale switch. Lots of outdoor stuff goes on in the summer evenings - outdoor music, riding bikes.
But we'd all be awake and not have to listen to constant complaining 2 weeks a year.
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Nobody cares. Everyone, obviously including you, understood what was meant. Haven't you picked up on that yet?
The EU and the West (Score:2)
Time to wake up and smell the end of DST and it's false promises
This will eventually get solved (Score:2)
In a few centuries, we'll be using Stardates.
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God ISN'T a name -- it is a title / job description. i.e. WHICH god is the OP referring to???
I'm assume you are coming from the Judaic / Christian / Islam perspective. "I AM" is the name you are looking for -- which wasn't used.
Instead of whining about other people's Free Will how about stop judging others?
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