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EU Backs Ending Daylight Saving Time (theguardian.com)
New submitter Zarhan writes: Earlier this summer, European Commission conducted a poll on whether EU citizens would like to abolish adjusting their clocks twice a year. The results are now in: 80% of the respondents want to get rid of the changes every spring and autumn. EU Commission is planning to follow through and abolish the practice. In EU, individual countries decide what timezone they belong in, but the clock adjustment is an EU-level decision. The recommendation for now is to stick to summer time year-round, although individual countries will make those decisions. More from DW. The changes are known to affect sleep patterns and causes loss in productivity and even heart attacks, especially when you lose one hour of sleep during the spring change. "I will recommend to the commission that, if you ask the citizens, then you have to do what the citizens say," said Jean-Claude Juncker, the commission's president. "We will decide on this today, and then it will be the turn of the member states and the European parliament."
"I will recommend to the commission that, if you ask the citizens, then you have to do what the citizens say," said Jean-Claude Juncker, the commission's president.
Well now, don't be hasty; this is the EU ... that "do what the citizens say" stuff sounds dangerously like democracy or something.
Just pick one and stay with it. This endless debate is wasting too much time --- time which could be far better spent trying to understand why we park cars on driveways.
As an EU citizen I commented on this and argued for abolishing the DST and keep standard time.
Staying in permanent "summer time" just means you are in another timezone than you claim. So that is plain stupid. Now you don't only have to know which time zone a country is in, you also have to know if they decided to be in permanent summer time or use the normal time associated with the time zone.
So, ditch the DST and let the countries decide what time zone they want to be in. NO SUMMER TIME ALLOWED! The effect is the same but it will be a heck lot easier for travelers or people communicating across time zones.
The endless debate isn't wasting as much time as we've already wasted on my work project, trying to answer the question of "if someone schedules a field test to happen every day, do they mean every 24 hours, or at the same time each day?" We've probably had a half dozen meetings so far to try dealing with timezone and Daylight Saving Time issues.
That's literally what this is doing. I commented in favour of scrapping changing - I'm in the UK, so by the time this happens it won't automatically apply to me. I do hope we follow suite here though.
Daylight savings time is a classic government boondoggle: a completely useless (at best) project that only got off the ground because (1) they weren't spending their own time or money on it, so there was nothing to lose, and (2) somebody identified a chance to engineer their own legacy.
Get rid of it. I personally am in favor of staying permanently on standard time, since where I live DST means getting up in the dark and going to bed in the light (which is ass backwards according to human nature).
stuff sounds dangerously like democracy or something
Rest assured. These polls are not known to the average European citizen. Only lobby groups check them, or mobilize others to check them. At no point was there a referendum or something like that.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Here in Canada there is a push in some regions to abolish daylight saving time. Parts of the country (e.g. Saskatchewan) are already sane about this. Ditto the northeast corner of B.C.
Even at my relatively southerly latitude (49 degrees north) summers are light regardless of our nominal time zone. Winters are dark, again, regardless of our time zone. If we stayed on PST (UTC-8) all year the sun would set at 2030 in the summer. What more do people want? And on PDT all year (UTC-7) the sun would still set at 1700 in December. What good is that? It wouldn't rise until 0900. Ugh.
...laura
While many believe DST was started for farming, in fact, most farmers don't like it. Historically, DST began in 1916, when the German Empire and its World War I ally Austria-Hungary introduced it as a way to conserve coal during wartime. Britain, most of its allies, and many European neutrals soon followed suit. Russia and a few other countries waited until the next year, and the United States adopted daylight saving in 1918. Broadly speaking, most jurisdictions abandoned daylight saving time in the years after the war ended in 1918 (with some notable exceptions including Canada, the UK, France, and Ireland). However, many different places adopted it for periods of time during the following decades and it became common during World War II. It became widely adopted, particularly in North America and Europe, starting in the 1970s as a result of the 1970s energy crisis.
The problem is if you live north of 35 degrees, like most of Europe, it doesn't matter if there is DST or not, there is simply too many hours of daytime in the summer and not enough in the winter.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I don't care if I go to work at 0600 hours or 1700 hours. Timezones are stupid. The military figured this out years ago.
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