Most of Europe will move to winter time tomorrow and also abolish DST and I have the same feelings about it as you. I prefer darker mornings than evenings, as I've never been an early riser.
To clarify, the European Commission had a public consultation on DST[1]. The response was strongly in favour of ending the clock changes, and furthermore favoured permanent DST. The EC has called on member states to come up with an appropriate way of accommodating the public’s preference, telling them to coordinate so that time differences across borders are kept to a sensible minimum.
No decision has been made yet to either abolish DST, or move the clock forward one hour permanently, and it might not happen at all. The member states are supposed to reply before next summer, so that the switch to DST next spring could be the last time changing clocks in Europe.
>To clarify, the European Commission had a public consultation on DST
A public consultation, conducted online, to which 4 million people (less that 1% of the population of Europe) answered. 3 million of those were from Germany.
I'm living in the EU. I go online and read various news items every day.
I'm baffled about the fact I somehow managed to miss that there was an official poll / call for direct citizen feedback on such a topic I personally care about.
I might have bit a bit distracted ... or the whole poll might not have been conducted particularly well.
Overrepresentation of a particular country might be a tell tale sign of local media coverage that was effectively done only in one country.
It looked like it was about to happen now or in 6 months (last switch) but Austria has asked for a delay to consider how it should implement it and Belgium and the Netherlands are following with that.
So basically I have now lost all hope that we are ever going to drop the switch in this century.
So much for public consultation and Europe being an oppressive administration force (some say it was made on purpose to highlight individual states unwillingness to cooperate).
Yes, because I will enjoy more day time. I never wake up early enough to be dark outside, so that was never a problem for me, but there are days in the winter when the sunset is just a few hours after I wake up.
For your location that may be an issue, but in other parts of Europe keeping summer time all year around will mean the sun doesn't rise until nearly 10am. The real issue here is such a large location is in the same timezone. The sun rises over 1 1/2 hours earlier in the East of Poland compared to the West of Spain, even though they are in the same timezone.
that's exactly what's already proposing Slovak ministry of labor meaning you will have sunrise in summer at 3:30 AM, despite out of Slovak participants in survey 53% voted for permanent DST and in whole EU survey it was even more favourable, let's hope for EU wide agreement on permanent DST, otherwise i will be rather switching time twice a year, despite voting against it in survey
Your timezone does not dictate how dark your evenings are. The days have exactly the same amount of daylight regardless of what numbers you choose to label the hours with.
Quite a few people work relative to market trading hours and customary times to hold earnings calls and roadshows. Sales people work around their store business hours. Schools have fixed schedules. Hours sadly dictate schedules for most people
Because market participants (i.e. brokers) need to 'mark to market'. That is, they need to transfer the net of their gains and losses to counter-parties. This occurs after the market close. To have continuously trading markets would require changing the supporting systems and regulations that support this.
That just shifts the question around. Why, as king, would you want to make sure that there's a period every day when no one is supposed to trade financial instruments?
The point is saying summer time is better than winter time regardless you where you live is meaningless. Depending where you live, the offset with the sun is different.
In France for example I'd rather we stick with winter time all year round, because I don't care if it's dark at 6pm on winter but doing your morning commute during the night is highly depressing.
FYI, I found that sunlight appearing at ~4am and disappearing long before dinner, like it does during the winter in places like the riviera Maya or Hungary, is even less fun. I'd pick a late sunrise like in Western France or Spain over an early sunset in a heartbeat.
> The point is saying summer time is better than winter time regardless you where you live is meaningless
True, but who said this? The grandparent only said that they were happy about the decision in their location. No one stated that summer time is better than winter time regardless of where you live.
One point about abandoning DST is that it does re-open these questions. It seems a bit crazy that Madrid and Warsaw are on the same time zone, and perhaps they will get around to fixing this while they're fiddling.
You're talking about the diurnal cycle, but what we call evenings are defined by social convention and certainly do get darker after the November time shift.
Yeah, I will just shift my kids classes in school and clubs unilaterally an hour down. Or opening hours in shop I want to go to. And move meeting and buss needed to go to places and what not.
And shift or service worker will just come an hour later, no big deal.
If shops and schools are sane, they will adjust the schedule according to daylight. No point keeping a shop open at 7am if there's no shoppers, because they're all sound asleep.
Of course, DST doesn't make sense outside a relatively small range of latitudes (too close to the equator and all days are 12 hours anyway; too far and summer evenings last until 9pm-10pm even with solar time).
In Italy, for example, having DST means you avoid dawn at 4am in the summer (getting nice longer evenings in exchange) _and_ dawn at 8.30am in the winter.
I assume a out-of-band Windows update will be imminent then. Half of out-of-band Windows updates are zero-days, the other half are frantic attempts to cope with countries changing their time zones on short notice.
What happened with smartphones is that most are configured to automatically track the timezone from the carrier, and some carriers didn't set it up correctly. So when the normal date for DST arrived this Sunday, these phones entered daylight savings time, even though this should happen only two weeks later.
(And of course, there's always the servers with unpatched software from 2016, and the servers with the Oracle JVM which for some reason uses its own copy of the tzdata database...)
Tell me about it. I had to update databases, linux servers, and java installations (tzupdater did not solve my java 8 issues, so I had to force JVMs into Etc/GMT+3).
I like daylight savings time, but I think it would be easier to just go to work an hour earlier.
I absolutely fucking love it. It makes up for the lack of snow or cold and dry days.
Four months where the sun is under 30°, where the color temp from daylight casts everything with a golden evening glow. A glance outside feels timeless as your brain tells you that it should be 2pm, but it looks like evening. It’s even more magical in the winter with that rare snowfall. The colors shift to a purple and grey when the sky is dark and filled with ice. When it clears, the spectrum shifts to thousands of shades of blues over a hundred minutes after sunset. There is an added bit of splendor when the world is awake and continues with its work but the sun is down.
I just moved back from 40° north to 48°, and those early sunsets, colorful days, and summer twilights were sorely missed.
I think that’s the only real objection to this move. Any country is entitled to do what it wants regarding DST, but transitions should be orderly and planned well in advance, not imposed from one day to the next.
I guess it shows how Morocco is not exactly a democratic country, so you get the classic tyrant-style decision-making here and there.
In a democracy a single individual couldn't make this decision, so if a president or prime minister decides to do such a drastic change so quickly other people (congress for example) will put a brake to it and force a reflexion/transition period.
Sure. When talking about Finland or Scandinavia. But it is very possible/likely to have a bunch of incompetent congress-man. That's even worse that a single incompetent douche.
A bunch of incompetent leaders can get nothing done. They'll focus on attacking each other and destroying what ground they live on. An incompetent leader will try to get his vision realized. Might not work all of it but some of it might pan out.
I think the parent is suggesting that they don’t do nothing. Only that they do nothing to further the best interests of the people. They will absolutely further their own interests and have little interest in the (often human cost) side-effects of attacking each other.
I think it has nothing to do with Democracy. Frankly, central authority should make this kind of stuff easier because a central entity can take into consideration all of the bureaucracies and do what needs to be done.
In Democracies, pushing through such changes has to be a nightmare - so many competing interests, populism, you have to find the right legislative window, legislation is burdened with irrelevant stuff, bureaucracies are resistant to change etc..
“Easier” means nothing. All those checks and balances you despise, will often produce transition plans that are much more respectful of the overall system - precisely because an authority cannot steamroll arbitrary changes that might harm this or that legitimate interest.
Efficiency and correctness are not the same thing.
Easier absolutely means something and I'm not suggesting we dump democracy.
FYI - most of your government, wherever you are from, is run by bureaucratic edict, not by political means.
The heads of government agencies often wield immense power and have no need to respond to voters interest because there's effectively too much 'on the ballot' so to speak, and too much mundane detail for voters to understand.
An technical that transcends agencies though ... my god man.
The government of Canada's (and probably the US as well) IT situation is a massive mess, there's no consistency across organizations, there's no concept of identity management across entities, let alone for the general public. Nothing is integrated, nothing works. You can have a doctor examine you in one place and it's very difficult to get your medical history across to a different entity. Try even finding a doctor? Who's available? Who's not? My health is at risk, I want to know where I can get a doctor? Nope. Shut up, we can't figure that out, it's too hard - go to a clinic and just see whoever is on duty - is the only answer. I would vote for a bunch of ex-Google PM's and Engineers to literally take over my nations IT (especially in Health) to simplify and scale it. Or at least to have it under the control of one entity.
Having someone say that, for example, “from tomorrow all your health data will be in Google Docs!” is likely to generate caos and harm people. Democratic government must operate on scales measured in decades, not months, and make sure to be as inclusive as possible (remote island with satellite internet? Probably will oppose any solution with 80mb of single-page JS. Etc etc). This makes for slow progress. It’s just how it is. Add to that the continuous jockeying of vendors, and poor training of administrative elites (a very underestimated problem in many countries)...
Modern society is just big and complex, no matter how hard we wish that weren’t the case.
"“from tomorrow all your health data will be in Google Docs"
Who is advocating that? Nobody. I didn't even infer that.
What I want is some highly talented and organized people, like those from Google, to take over IT for Healthcare in Canada, and then shift our non-existent IT solutions over to something that works. Because right now it's a non-existent bureaucratic mess.
"Modern society is just big and complex, no matter how hard we wish that weren’t the case"
I didn't say it wasn't.
But that doesn't mean that many governments aren't supremely inefficient in many areas. Canadian Healthcare IT being a big one.
CGI, a Canadian IT company spent $2B making the Obamacare sign up website - something a handful of Google Engineers had to come in and fix. They basically wrote much of it from scratch.
But one person can say "We are now at war!" and the missiles start flying. That seems like a much more fraught decision than whether or not to stay on daylight saving time.
> I would vote for a bunch of ex-Google PM's and Engineers to literally take over my nations IT (especially in Health) to simplify and scale it.
I have seen that happening (not with Googlers, not at a national level) within my province/state and now everyone has to deal with an inefficient global IT management service that is borderline useless and has the "know-it-all" syndrome.
YMMV.
(My department managed to be the rebel over the years and we have our own setup but it's slowly getting taken away from us.)
What's 'crazy' is that people would think this is crazy. Or even a new idea or an idea that ever went away.
And what does this have to do with Nationalism? Nothing.
Someone suggests something not normative and people yell 'Trump'?
Consider how South Korea, Japan, France, UK, Germany, Poland, Belgium were re-built after the war?
It was mostly centrally planned management by powers, taking a lot of orders from Washington. 'post war' is a great opportunity for central power as most of the value creating enterprises are obvious, and very low hanging fruit: i.e. 'we need schools, and roads, and electricity where all that has been undone'.
Nobody is suggesting totalitarianism, some people just point out that in many cases, a well organized and efficient control system is much better than bureaucratic kludge.
For Italy, it’s actually the opposite: centrally-managed efforts have typically failed, while grassroots-led initiatives are pretty solid. We did get tons of money after the war, but reconstruction was not a coherent effort.
Why is not working in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq ? From what I remember De gaulle (and others) fought over the distrification of western Europe that the US wanted after the war.
I'm curious to know, what is the point of linking to solar time? What advantage is there to the Sun reaching its highest point at 12 'o clock?
Most people are awake for about 6 hours before noon, and about 10 hours after. Most social events also happen after the work day. So our day is already shifted from what would logically follow from our clock. Being on +2 already feels like a compromise between the two.
I'd love it if getting up at 4am and going to bed at 8pm was the norm, and solar noon was the exact midpoint of the day, but as I am not a recluse I cannot start that trend, and therefore shifting the timezones seems more reasonable.
As I presume you know, Solar noon represents the highest point of the Sun in the day. It seems fitting that the 'work hours' should be 4 hrs either side of that (8am-4pm).
Being a 'sunlover' I'm regularly up before dawn so that I can catch the first rays of Sun as it crosses the horizon. To me it's the most beautiful part of the day. Unfortunately, we have semi-arbitrarily defined 'zones' that fluctuate 1hr because of the propagandist notion that extra daylight at the end of the day means more people will be outside enjoying the Sun. This DST causes my work day to suddenly shift so that I'm forced to go to work earlier than normal, & I miss a lot of sunrises as a result.
I like this idea of solar noon for times... Especially for overseas communications too... because we'd just need to know the longitude of the person to know their exact time. (Currently, I'm forced to use timeanddate.com to work out relative overseas times).
Where I am, the state to the North of me doesn't follow DST (Qld), whereas mine does (nsw) and it creates havoc around the beginning/end of DST.
So, at least for me, there are three reasons to use solar noon based time rather than the current system. I'm sure I could come up with more.
That said, I go to bed early too, and acknowledge that isn't the way most people live.
DST may be bad, but discrete (as opposed to continuous) time zones are not. Having decent-sized economic and social zones where clocks don't change at all is extremely useful, and is in fact the main reason time zones were invented.
I sure don't want to have to think about a few minutes of time difference between Oakland and Sacramento, after all.
I've done a 10-7 shift, it's miserable. Waste half your morning, and half your evening. You have to get ready for work when stores and banks are just opening, and you get home just as those shops are closing.
I prefer 7-4 because it leaves a bit of late afternoon and the whole evening.
Why would I use prime daytime on work indoors? Logically, prime daytime should be used for leisure and other time for work. I propose Delayed-Onset-Mornings and say we should work from noon to 2000.
Obligatory link to the tireless volunteers who maintain the timezone databases and cope with the last minute, sometimes even retrospective timezone changes.
Spain will likely drop DST in a year or two, like most EU countries, but it’s not clear which side it will “land”. In this context, maybe Morocco is using this leap forward as a lobbying effort to nudge Spain towards the timezone it prefers.
Türkiye did this a few years ago. Working remotely from here for a California company has been less than fun during the winter as my work day now ends at 21:00, severely hampering evening social / music outings.
Well, I have an active social life, and I'm not a big fan of working in the evening, so sure I can adjust it, but it's frustrating.
Turkey is a bird. The Turkish word for Turkey is Hindi (which is funny, because the Turkish word for India is Hindistan, -stan means country, so a literal translation of Hindistan is "Country of Turkey")
Türkiye is the Turkish spelling for the Republic of Turkey.
Okay. Regardless, it is the commonly accepted English spelling (whereas Peking is not), and is not used in Chinese (except in unusual situations). So comparing it to Türkiye vs Turkey makes no sense, which was my point.
It is the word the Chinese would like non-Chinese to use when talking about the city. It’s a classic example of modern cultural re-appropriation, because Peking was the widely-accepted transliteration - until attitudes (and power) changed and the Chinese asked the world to use Beijing instead. It wouldn’t be particularly far-fetched to imagine Turks might also ask the world, eventually, to use their own spelling to refer to the country - especially considering the unfortunate overlap of the word “turkey” in English.
The original commenter's HN profile links to his LI account here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nomadicengineer/ . He states that he lives in Turkey currently, but spent a lot of time in the US. Most famously, the commenter was the only sysadmin for frickin' Napster! Wow! So, yeah, he's legit!
Mr. Halligan, how was Napster back in those days? Like, do you have a blog about that time period?
> Mr. Halligan, how was Napster back in those days? Like, do you have a blog about that time period?
I was the "only" sysadmin when I was at Napster (We had 2 people in desktop support/it, one of whom actually died a few years later. The guy I replaced, Stephen Fountain, was actually shot to death by police). We hired 2 more a week or two before I left. It was a shit-show that I prefer to forget. (I'm also not at all proud of my work there. I was an unprofessional, somewhat incompetent 19 year-old workaholic who worked 100 hours a week and did a half-assed job at everything, which in the end actually was a huge net-negative to the organization, and myself!)
Hrm, thinking through this more, one of those guys from IT, Ryan, a big-hearted (literally) lumberjack of a guy died of congestive heart failure. Then our CEO died on his bicycle a few years back, and there was also a suicide of one of the developers. It was a cursed company.
Oh Jesus! I'm sorry for your losses. I just lost a good friend before his time, as well. It's never easy and the hole just stays there.
Thank you for the VERY frank responses, I appreciate the effort and the time. As a follow-up question, do you think the 100 hour weeks had diminishing returns after what point, if at all? Also, how is the work-life balance in Turkey in general?
No you don't. Only the maintainer of tzdata. All we have to do is make sure we use an up-to-date version of tzdata, which all modern operating systems do automatically (although probably not quite before tomorrow).
I don't like DST and think that instead the time zone offset should be set so that 12:00 is at approximately solar noon, and then count the seconds without changing for DST or anything else.
Where I live, solar noon is around 11:30am. The sun rising at 4:30am and setting at 6:30pm in the summer is sad. It's even worse in the winter when the sun sets at 4:30pm.
(And I come from a country where solar noon is 2pm in the summer, making evenings quite enjoyable)
My opinion is, if you do not want to have dinner when it is dark, then have dinner when it is not dark. It is dark or light depending on what season, and what location, rather than the clock, anyways, whether you use DST or not.
The clock is good can tell you the time and how much time is passed and to synchronize the schedule for TV shows and cron events on computer and whatever, but is dark independently from that. If solar noon is at approximately 12:00 then the time doesn't jump (causing many problems with appointments and complications with other stuff that it doesn't need), and it will match with a sundial approximately and closely enough, but also that between for example 01:00 and 13:00 is going to be twelve hours, without needing to deal with DST.
(Avoiding DST is simplifying the computer programming too, as well as many other stuff too, so that is also good.)
It's worth keeping Greenwich Mean Time as the time used in Greenwich, London and Britain. When arranging meetings etc, it's sometimes confusing to people far away from Britain that, during the summer, it's not "GMT" in London. That would be worse if Britain decided to use GMT+1 permanently.
What other countries do leads on from that, otherwise there's not much point to timezones.
No, it’s worth dropping the anglocentric “GMT” altogether and using UTC everywhere instead. Let’s decouple time measurement from accidents of history, and make rational choices about what we want our life to be in the future, rather than being shackled by pointless traditions.
Occurs to me that, technically, for those of us who are wired, we could end this eternal time-battle once and for all.
Since we're having our locations tracked anyway, each of us could be our own time-zone, have whatever time each of us wants... on a whim. Coordinated-by-device-times!
This week we might go mostly-retro and arrange our meetings by local-solar-noon. Next week, full-retro, by local moon-phase.
Well it didn't live long. We were always at GMT and now ten years later of ever using DST we are stuck with it. Not complaining. I hate having to fix the microwave clock.
Right now, this DST discussion will hang low on the front page, but a few months from now when we reverse it, you can bet that once again a discussion about DST will be the top story for at least a day and linger in our minds for two weeks until we promptly forget it.
Two different things. There is the clock which tracks the time (simplifying here), and the timezone data that helps display the clock. Changing observances requires you to push an update to computers to tell them that humans have decided to change the rendering of the time but the time itself does not change.
You could do something like Google has done with the Leap Smear on a larger scale, but the better question is why does the clock change need to happen at all? There's really no reason for it.
It would be vastly easier for businesses which wish to let their employees out early enough to enjoy the sunlight to change their hours for a few months than for the entirety of society to change their sense of time.
Also, you'd be surprised how many clocks are not Internet-connected, as a lot of people still rely on clocks on their microwave, oven, car radio, etc. And in my case, I am absolutely reliant on one (or, often, like three) completely dumb alarm clocks, because they aren't subject to the whims of my phone doing dumb things like not ringing when it should.
> It would be vastly easier for businesses which wish to let their employees out early enough to enjoy the sunlight to change their hours for a few months than for the entirety of society to change their sense of time.
Actually it wouldn't, because businesses have their hours set based upon the entirety of society's sense of time.
This only really matters for customer-facing roles in specific-hours businesses. Anyone working in the background, in admin, or on project work likely doesn't need to be available in person 100% of the working hours.
Yes. The clock doesn't need to change. You can schedule your employees out early to enjoy sun if they like to do, regardless of what the clock says.
If you are scheduling a meeting, you will specify the time by the clock, but how to decide what time, can be decided by whatever else is applicable, such as when it is light or dark outside, or other considerations, and then know what time on the clock that time will be, to schedule.
Yes, many clock won't and shouldn't need to be Internet. Even so, you can also to use a sundial or pocketwatch, anyways. I also use "dumb" alarm clocks, actually.
Interestingly, this is an enumerated power under the U.S. Constitution. Article 1 section 8 explicitly grants Congress the power to "fix the Standard of Weights and Measures".
Not exactly, they do not have complete control. States can choose their timezone, they can choose whether to adopt DST or not. They cannot choose to switch to DST all year round though.
Can't they just move to the neighboring time zone and not adopt DST? (i.e. If California wants permanent summer time, they can switch to MST and sync up with Arizona ("America/Phoenix"))
Texas has, in recent years, changed the dates at which they adopted DST more than once (it was something to do with Halloween trick-or-treating and candy lobbyists).
edit: to answer my own question: there are some rumors about candy manufacturers influencing legislators to implement dst after Halloween so more children would partake and they would make more money. Doesn't seem to have anything to do with Texas in particular and might not be true at all.
But please correct me if I'm wrong.
Even then the states don't really have control. Me and my friends can decide to do whatever we want. We listen to the government because it's hard to coordinate and no one else has stepped up. No one really has any control.
In practice, yes they do have control. If Oregon decides tomorrow to officially give up DST, then everyone in Oregon would start using that new time zone.
Not sure what point you’re making other than that in general, the existence of states depends on people recognizing them and following their rules, which is true but doesn’t have much to do with DST specifically.
Why can't we just get rid of time zones altogether and just use UTC exclusivsly? The amount of productivity lost to dealing with them is immeasurably high. I proposed this over dinner with some friends recently and they thought it was nuts, but within 20 minutes of discussion I think I had convinced most of them (or they just wanted me to shut up). Maybe once we colonise Mars and the meaning of a day becomes more vague, this will become the de facto way of communicating time.
You still have to maintain all of the same information. Keeping track of the local solar time for cities, countries, and regions. Also, consider what it would be like to travel to other time zones. Not only do you have to learn of the UTC offset for the local region in terms of the time of day, but you have to keep remembering it constantly for everything you do throughout the day.
So now, if you're living on the East Coast and you want to get up at 8am local time you need to set your alarm to 12pm UTC instead. But when you travel to Hawaii you need to set your alarm to 6pm UTC. And now every single one of your waking days is distributed across two days with the day change happening at local 2pm in the afternoon. Your work week is Monday through Saturday, your weekend is Saturday through Monday.
I do not understand why anyone ever thinks this insanity sounds like a good idea.
Because that still doesn't solve the problem of having to know the local offset to know if a proposed time is reasonable for them, for say a meeting.
It also makes it easier to talk to others, if they say "6pm" you think "dinner time" or "just off work" without having to know the location of the person, at the time they're talking about, which may not even be where they are.
Surely people would just start using some sort of utility that tells them 'people in X are usually awake between these hours'. It replaces an existing problem with a slightly different problem but the net gain is you remove all the annoying edge cases people currently have to deal with when converting between time zones. For example, no longer being confused about how long your flight lasts that traverses time zones.
A utility that converts UTC to a description of what subjective time of day it is... maybe even represented with numbers... congratulations! You've just reinvented local time zones!
This kind of local planning is far more common than long-range travel, and should be optimized for.
For edge cases involving cross-time-zone travel and communication, the solution I've seen implemented most often is to have two date-times shown in parallel. e.g. a flight is from 12:00 Pacific (4:00 Japan) - 14:00 Japan (22:00 Pacific).
