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.
I’ll take 7 hour workdays in summer instead.
I fucking hate it
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!
When I worked an hourly job on the night shift, we would all clock out to change the time and then clock back in.
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.
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
It’s all a plot by Big Torch!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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!
Time is a human construct there is no “supposed”.
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?
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.
deleted by creator
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.
To people thinking of enforcing UTC around the globe:
obligatory: https://qntm.org/abolish
Before I read this article, I also thought it would be a great idea to get rid of timezones entirely and just use UTC for everything. To quote from the link,
Abolishing time zones brings many benefits, I hope. It also:
- causes the question “What time is it there?” to be useless/unanswerable
- necessitates significant changes to the way in which normal people talk about time
- convolutes timetables, where present
- means “days” (of the week) are no longer the same as “days”
- complicates both secular and religious law
- is a staggering inconvenience for a minimum of five billion people
- makes it near-impossible to reason about time in other parts of the world
- does not mean everybody gets up at the same time, goes to work at the same time, or goes to bed at the same time
- is not simpler.
As long as humans live in more than one part of the world, solar time is always going to be subjective. Abolishing time zones only exacerbates this problem.
(copied from one of my 9-month old comments)
I mean the best refute of it I’ve ever heard is that the date changes in the middle of the day, and that sounds miserable
UTC all around the world is a completely different thing than UTC (or UTC+1) all over Europe. China also spans just over three natural timezones and they get by just fine with one.
they get by just fine with one.
China spans five geographic time zones and it does cause some pain to those living far away from Beijing. It’s not a great system.
Because Beijing should be using Chongqing time, yes, then the offset of clock noon to natural noon would be at most something like ±1.5 hours.
I advocate for UTC everywhere. So far I’m always dismissed as a joke.
Because time doesn’t really matter in any of those situations.
You still need to know all that information.
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.
So no night shift bonus until contract is renegotiated…?
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
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.
Mid-day should be the middle of the day. Mid-night should be the middle of the night.
You’d need new clocks, those times drift every day, so 12:00 midday would need to change automatically.
Yeah this comment makes no sense lol who is upvoting this?
Morons, people who didn’t read it fully, and people who want to encourage discourse.
There are a lot of regions that are put into the wrong time zone, because that’s easier for business. They’re not even close to 12:00 being the middle of the day especially during DST.
It also depends on your location within your particular time zone. You can’t have noon at the same time of day on both the eastern and western end of the zone.
We aren’t all having the same argument. Solar noon should, indeed, be close to chronological noon, but that will only ever be true in the center of the time zone.
On “standard time” on the western end of a time zone, solar noon is (ostensibly) 11:30 am, while on the eastern end, it’s 12:30. Under DST, those times shift to 12:30 and 13:30, respectively. In zones wider than 15 degrees, there can be more than an hour difference.
When the eastern end of the zone argues for permanent Standard Time, and the western end of the zone argues for permanent DST, both ends are arguing for the same preference.
“Midday” (solar noon) should indeed be close to noon, but midday should never be before 12:00pm.
The solution is to lock the clocks on one system or the other, and allow political subdivisions to move the line so their clocks work best for them.
If you like more light in the evening, go to bed late and wake up late.
What about people who are in school or employed?
Tell my employer that.
This but unironic. Employers just do what everyone is doing, and will stop when everyone else does.
You’re more likely to win the euromillion than to successfully shift norms away from the 8:30-18:00 working hours. This shit is baked into every employment contract out there. I work an office job where it doesn’t matter so much, but anyone who works shifts or a time-sensitive job is stuck there basically forever regardless of the time zone.
Yes, but the EU is split into four time zones now and if you implement this technically there would be many more:
8 if we’d have 30-min time-zones 16 if we’d have 15-min time-zones 24 if we’d have 10-min time-zones 48 if we’d have 5-min time-zones 240 if we’d have 1-min time-zones
I’m not saying we should keep dst, but we can’t have everyone have midday at 12:00 and midnight at 00:00.
You can keep 1 hour time zones just fine. It still puts noon within 1 hour of mid day, which you don’t get with DST.
I can accept that. So long as after we lock the clocks on standard time, my region is allowed to switch to the next time zone to the west.
I don’t think the “noon = midday” argument is complete. I think noon should be close to, but never before midday. Midday should never occur at 11:30 AM, like it currently does on the western ends of the zones.
If you are arguing for permanent standard time and you are on the eastern end of your time zone, you are making the same argument as someone advocating DST from the western end.
That’s how it was back in the day. When you walked over a couple of villages you’d have to change your watch by 3 minutes.
I’m all for aligning life with the rhythm of nature and all, but I don’t see how that’d work in current times.
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
Understandable. Everyone is sleepy this week.
Your first two lines need a caveat: … at a local meridian as chosen by the will of the people*.
Otherwise you end up in situations where every individual location sets their clock by local noon, which varies by longitude. If you think it’s bad there are a handful of different time zones across your continent, wait until it’s different from one end of town to the other.
The British invented (or popularised) standard time to avoid those sorts of problems. Problems that didn’t exist until high-speed long distance travel became a thing. And time zones were a later addition because Britain didn’t need any, but they’re also somewhat necessary.
* for “will of the people”, read “will of the ruling class” as necessary. See: China.
We need a standard system for tracking time. If every city decides their own time based on the sun it will be chaos.
Have the whole world go on UTC, that way there’s never confusion.
I’ve had way too many conversations with people that simply can’t comprehend how that works. “But then we’d have to do everything so much earlier, it would be dark all the time.” I try to explain that we’d still do everything at the same time of day, just call it something different, but they just can’t wrap their minds around that.
We can’t. It’d make it too easy to discover how arbitrary “9 to 5” is.
China has one time zone, but in Xinjiang they use local time anyway. Getting everyone on one time zone for daily use is unlikely.
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!
This is the way
While we’re at it, cancel the time zones. I have no fucking clue why we’re still pretending everyone wakes up at the same time of the day all over the world. All it does is mess up scheduling for when you actually want to talk to people on the other side of the world.
How would we decide to handle the date with no time zones? Half the world would have a date switch during the daytime. Not necessarily impossible to navigate but it would be confusing for a while.
That is up to the people to decide. Have the date switch at 00:00 whenever that is, or switch it at whatever time is the middle of the night - I just want to be able to see the time written out and be able to tell how many hours from now that’s happening without googling what flavor of time fuckery any specific time zone abbreviation means. I don’t think changing dates is going to be more confusing than some countries having 15 minutes ahead of GMT time zones or screwing up everyone’s circadian rhythms twice a year.
That’s going to be way worse. I can get down with no timezones, but if we replace time zones with date zones you’ll end up with two locations where the same instant of time is either March 2nd at 3am or March 1st at 3am. There really just isn’t an easy way to handle time that works for all weird geographies and also makes it easy to schedule things across an ocean. But also, fuck daylight savings, that’s a totally unnecessary way of making it all worse than it needs to be.
I don’t mind just changing the date a 0 hours everywhere at once, personally. Though, there’s also a thing Japan already does where they list time at 25:00, 26:00 and so on - meaning 1 AM, 2 AM, but tomorrow. I think that might be handy for when you want to list the time that would technically be tomorrow but still during the current daylight period.
But… That’s already the case even with timezones… There already is an international date line where one side is a day off the other.
Imagine going to work and writing March 31st on documents all morning, and April 1st all afternoon.
You might remember that you have an appointment on the 5th. But, when you wake up on the 5th, you’ve already missed it.
I’ve heard a few complaints today from people irl about having to change their clocks. Not about the time change itself, but having to change the time on clocks. It took me two minutes lol.
My eyes are tired, billy
It’s 6 am but is it really
Whether it’s 5 or 6 or 7, it’s too early.
I have not changed the clock for like 10 years or more. All my clocks are synchronized and the oven/microwave clock will permanently be a 00:00, I don’t have time set it every time lights go out…
No one is complaining about when we all gain an hours sleep in Autumn
I have never liked it.
As a person, I don’t like the inconsistency.
As a developer, I don’t like to not be able to use the local time as a consistent way to order data.
As a father, I don’t like to have to adjust a daily routine of my baby who has just reached a good 24 hour schedule.
I do. I can’t stand it because where I live it means I will no longer see the sun. Not to even mention how much it sucks ass from a mental standpoint to get out of work and have it be dark. I could not care less if I see a tiny bit of sunlight on my way to work lol. I’ve had multiple jobs where once ST hits, I’m going to work and coming home in darkness. I literally dont see the sun until the weekend. Imo give me whichever option that maximizes sunlight during most people’s free time.
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 hate the sun.
Fuck that yellow bastard.
You hate standard time
DST moves the sun an hour later in the day
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.
Putting out a fire you started feels like doing hero’s work.
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.
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 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
Ah yeah, fair point. I didn’t consider that option
I wish I could sleep however much I want or need. That sounds lovely.
Trying to make a non issue an issue
Yup, the time without DST is fine and they introduced DST that is an issue
