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.
The simple fact is that on the Monday after DST starts, more people have heart attacks and strokes.
Meaning that not going away from it means people will continue to die from it.
I wasn’t sure if you were joking, but nope: https://newsroom.heart.org/news/heres-your-wake-up-call-daylight-saving-time-may-impact-your-heart-health
They need to seriously quit this bullshit. It serves no practical purpose in our modern society, while also having tangible negative effects. So why keep doing it?
I enthusiastically support getting rid of this nonsense.
More daylight in summer rocks. It would be equally rocking in Winter. The clocks shoud stay forward.
But wouldn’t it be neat if midnight was att 00:00 and mid day was 12:00?
Also, you don’t get more daylight by moving the clock. You get more clock.
it never actually served a practical purpose. It was argued about then, too.
I’ll take 7 hour workdays in summer instead.
I live in a non-DST area and it is very nice
The only time I’m reminded that DST is a thing in most of the world, is when people are complaining about it online after it already switched over.
I like DST. I like having sunlight later into the evening during the summer.
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.
The objection isn’t to DST, it’s to switching back and forth. Just pick one and stick with it.
Split the difference at 30 minutes, and call it a day!
½ an hour is a very short day
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.
I’m okay with that plan, although I’m curious why you find it so important.
In any case that’s a problem with the layout of time zones not with DST.
For most of the past 110 years or so since DST was implemented, for 3/4 of the year, we have had solar noon occurring at 13:00 in the center of each time zone. You’re already living with it most of the time. We’ve established school schedules, work schedules, industrial schedules, laws (such as curfews, noise ordinances, parking enforcement) and all sorts of infrastructure on the idea that for 3/4 of the year, there will be one more hour of daylight after 12:00pm than there is before 12:00 pm.
Either approach we take, we are going to upend a wide variety of laws, rules, practices, and customs that have been established over the past century. Adopting legacy standard time is going to impact events over 3/4 of the year; adopting permanent DST is going to impact events over 1/4 of the year.
We should select the system that minimizes disruption. That system is DST.
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.
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?
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…
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!
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 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.
The thing I don’t get is why it happens in the summer rather than the winter.
In the UK it gets dark at about 4pm in winter. We basically get no leisure time during daylight but we do get a bit of light during getting ready for work time when we don’t really need it.
It’s all a plot by Big Torch!
In the US they claim it’s about kids walking to school/the bus stop
No one is complaining about when we all gain an hours sleep in Autumn
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.
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.
I hate the sun.
Fuck that yellow bastard.
You hate standard time
DST moves the sun an hour later in the day
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.
This makes no sense. Changing the number on the clocks isn’t what makes you change your sleep/wake cycle AT ALL. It’s changing when the working day starts that does that.
Uh yeah, that’s what I said.
I score zero for reading comprehension!
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.
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.
Putting out a fire you started feels like doing hero’s work.
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.
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)
So no night shift bonus until contract is renegotiated…?
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 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
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.
Yeah, that is silly. If you’re going to be that radical, you may as well go decimal at the same time. 10 hours, 100 minutes, 100 seconds. Ignore when the sun rises. Have 400 days in a year, ignore when the seasons come. I bet you my best docker container people hate and ignore the broken system that bears no relationship to their reality.
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
Nobody stops programmers from converting everything into UTC when data and queries go in and back to local time when data comes out.
In fact I worked in a number of systems used across quite a number of time zones (mainly EMEA, but sometimes including all of the US) in Finance and that’s exactly how we did it.
Users could work with their local time and meanwhile the system was always internally consistent because at the data level it used a single standard timezone (which has no such thing as daylight savings) for the whole World.
Handling Timezones in systems with a central master datastore for the whole World is a solved problem, it’s just that most programmers don’t actually work in such systems during their careers so aren’t used to it.
It’s like you didn’t think I had real life scenarios that didn’t fit into this fix.
What happens when the interfaced system provides a date without timezone information? What happens when they provide multiple timezones? What happens when they have more than one site location, and they just send you a 12-hour time and date?
You can always point to the customer - say “hey, we need better data.” But what happens when you have 4000 customers scattered all over the world?
Or another scenario - you are doing optical character recognition, and the document always has a date/time on it. The date and time is usually printed, but sometimes it’s handwritten. Maybe part of the process is to verify that date matches with a date in a legacy system. The date in the legacy system is local to your business, but there is no information on what the datetime on the document is.
I’ve run into so many problems with time in my career that I’m fairly certain it’s created more work than any other problem.
When the date timezone is not specified the interface just picks up the local time of the user. Even web stuff will send you this info so even there is perfectly doable.
I’m talking about systems where we design both the interface and the backend.
If the user wants a different behaviour it’s up to them to specify it and the interface is designed so that they can do it it - if they don’t it’s their problem, not the system’s: this is hardly the only situation were the software can’t just guess information that’s not provided (random example, when a full name is provided in a single line: has it been provided family name first and then surname or the other way around - this is also an international problem by the way since in most of Asia the natural order tends to be family name first: the most common solution for this is to just break it into two fields, explicitly one for surname and family name, but that introduces the problem of which middle names are part of the surname and which are part of the family name, for people with more than 2 names).
Generally the approach in systems design for balancing the need for complete and consistent information of a software system operating in a certain environment (such as across timezones and having to compare data between time zones) with users, being human hence naturally only providing part of the information and not context (mentally they just assume those things which for them “are always the same” and generally don’t even think about them, whilst programmer do think about it because computers are stupid) is to provide good defaults and if that context information is important for your system, designing the UI to have a “validate this” step which makes it very obvious the default value that has been filled for that information or some other mechanism (it really depends on the business process that the user is following) and lets the user change it (for when they do in fact want something else), along with the means for the user to pull out that data and correct it later because somebody at some point will invariably make a mistake in entering data and have to fix it.
All this is a foundational element of software design - humans will always go around carrying tons of assumptions in their minds about a ton of things and don’t want to “waste time” always filling in the form the value for those assumptions, so as a system designer you have to find a balance between not wasting the time (and patience) of lots of users because you’re forcing them to have to enter info that’s redundant 99.99% of the time, and data consistency - and you do that by designing appropriate user flows and user interfaces, which include taking in account that people will always make mistakes (so you design your system to reduce the chances of human error AND give them a process for later correcting the info info they entered).
Granted, proper design of multi-tiered systems (which include a UX/UI) to balance user needs and the almost laughably bad level of data “integrity”, completness and consistency in the minds and communication of human users, with system needs, isn’t exactly a common skill amongst software developers: I’ve seen plenty of junior devs and even mid-level devs expressing the very same frustrations as you about lots of things (not just dates and times) and blaming the users - blaming lusers is almost a stereotipical thing for programmers at a certain level of seniority - and then the whole thing boils down to crap systems design (often UI, but often also things like not have the appropriate steps in user flows to make sure unusual cases - such as users entering times in a timezone other than their local one - are spotted and validated/adjusted) and/or their own selfisheness that life should be harder for the many in order for them - the few - having an easier life.
Ultimatelly, the (IMHO) error of your point of view is that you seem to be forgetting that we programmers do our work for our users, not for ourselves - it’s up to us to design our software to be used by humans within the environment they live in, not for everybody else to change their lives to make our job easier. This too is a foundational element of software design.
It’s up to programmers to adapt to the conventions of most people in the World, not the other way around.
By “interface” I meant the data interface between systems. Not a User Interface.
Additionally, it’s been my experience that I rarely get to design the full stack - we inevitably have to handled data exchange and legacy systems. Those legacy systems are a type of “user” in this instance that we have to program for. We can take a 13:30 string, and store it in UTC, but without location or time zone being provided through that (which the message queue that we pull from doesn’t have), it doesn’t do us anything.
The solution for these type of problems usually involve find another source of data and mapping the time that way. This inevitably ends up being far more work for us because of the security, traceability, auditing, etc.
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
Totally this discussion has been going on for ages let’s just say its dumb in this fay and age and stop it.
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It’s the standard. It’s what clocks are “supposed” to be set at. DST forces everyone to pretend it’s another time. Let people take advantage of summer daylight how they see fit rather than forcing them to.
Yeah, but we spend just over 4 months on “standard” time, and almost 8 months on “summer” time. Why do we only use “standard” time for roughly 1/3 of the year?
Time is a human construct there is no “supposed”.
It’s what clocks are “supposed” to be set at
Even better for us Dutchies: CEST shifts us one hour, but our timezone is the same as the rest of the mainland, but technically we’re inside the UTC zone, so we’re actually shifted 2 hours from where we’re supposed to be!
Fuck the economy, I want our times fixed, so we can sleep better!
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.
I prefer more sunlight in the morning. It’s better for your circadian rhythm and it is easier to wake up when it’s bright outside.
Of course the US does DST several weeks later than the rest of the world
I think you have that backwards. The US changed their clocks to DST several weeks ago (March 9).
I’d definitely prefer more sunlight in the morning. It’s 6:45am right now and the sun hasn’t even risen yet and won’t start for another half hour.
Meanwhile, more sunlight later in the day is often gone to waste anyway, between work/commute/dinner/etc. It’s especially wasteful later in the summer… You already have sunlight super late in the day anyway.
But honestly, I would take either as long as it stops changing.
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.
Ok, how many analogue clocks does everyone have?
I would have never known if it wasn’t because a coworker told me or because of articles like these. My cat wakes me up at 7- 7:30 and he did that this morning too, so I was very surprised that I slept only 7 hours instead of 8 (before I knew). But the funnits part is that my cat followed DST haha
Your cat must be in on the conspiracy. Perhaps even part of the deep state.
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.
I have a taxi company. On one night, one of my drivers did two jobs, one dispatched at 00:15, the other at 00:45, and he clocked off at 02:15. How long was he working for?
A) 1 hour
B) 2 hours
C) 3 hours
D) 2 hours 30 minutes
E) any of the above
A, B or C.
D would mean that you are in a country with a half hour DST offset, in which case we would miss the option 1 hour and 30 minutes.
D can also happen if the 00:45 job was before the 00:15 job, which thanks to the magic of daylight savings, is also possible
When I worked an hourly job on the night shift, we would all clock out to change the time and then clock back in.
American here, trick question, it’s E. Irrelevant, the driver is only paid through tips and the employer doesn’t pay payroll taxes, so his working hours are of no consequence.
E is “any of the above”
Right, he worked 1 hours, then 2, then 3, then 2.5, then (1, then 2, … (…)) without any breaks!
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.
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…
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 fucking hate it
