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.
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.
it never actually served a practical purpose. It was argued about then, too.
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.
Time of day is a human invention. We can assign the date lines wherever we like.
Like Japan was nuts. Dark at 3pm in winter. Light at 3am in summer. They’d benefit by shifting that shit two hours forward for sure.
I disagree. The angle of the sun is not a human invention. Trying to invent something from scratch based on that, I would definitely mark one time as “the darkest” and another “the lightest”.
I agree that hours, and therefore date lines and time zones are completely arbitrary though.
If we didn’t have hours we’d still need a way to group times by geographic or political regions; my example above still needs to handle the “lightest where?” question.
I think my conclusion is that organizing people and societies is arbitrary by nature.
It would be neater though to try to make midnight and mid day the basis for which we measure time. Stepping off of that makes it even more arbitrary.
We’re not disagreeing then. I’m just saying some date lines aren’t in the right place in general, but what really matters most? What are our priorities? I don’t think most light and most dark is better, even if it were possible to get every time zone just right.
I feel like having a life, and kids being able to play for longer after school without it being dark throughout the summer is pretty awesome.
It’s that or have school and work finish earlier. I’m all for that, lol.
No one is complaining about when we all gain an hours sleep in Autumn
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.
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.
You’ll trade one day of one extra hour of sleep for increased misery all winter long?
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.
In the US they claim it’s about kids walking to school/the bus stop
I fucking hate it
Trying to make a non issue an issue
Yup, the time without DST is fine and they introduced DST that is an issue
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 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
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!
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
Wow, I didn’t even think of that option. Savage.
Edit: I’m gonna steal this to annoy my coworkers.
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)
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.
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
Wasn’t DST invented in America? How did it even get adopted by the EU?
I’m also seeing that it was formerly used in Russia, India, South America, and some parts of Africa, and it is still used in 4/5ths of Canada and 1/3 of Australia.
New Zealand entomologist George Hudson first proposed modern DST.
Easy to google, bud. Also, the concept is ancient.
That guy was in 1895, which is a hundred years after Ben Franklin suggested it, but neither of them were responsible because it wasn’t adopted until the early 20th century in Canada, Germany, Austria, and the USA roughly in that order.
Well thanks. TIL.
Having said that, “mentioning” is not inventing.
It would be cool if we had fat burning pizza. There you have it. I mentioned it first, so I invented it.
Not your fault that the Internet is full of casual misinformation. None of us are immune from that.
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.
Ok, how many analogue clocks does everyone have?
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.
The objection isn’t to DST, it’s to switching back and forth. Just pick one and stick with it.
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
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.
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.
Yeah this comment makes no sense lol who is upvoting this?
my problem with that is thats not really up to me, if i have to be up for work or down for work in a given time. and id love to leave work and have a bit of sunlight left.
Tell my employer that.
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.
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.
Yep… And damn I put so much effort into working that out and still got it wrong
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.
Na, we should get rid of that idea completely. If everyone used one time like UTC (other time zones are available) and just align your working hours etc to your location.
Then 14:00 is 14:00 everywhere, just that some are asleep then, others are awake!
