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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."
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.
No need to be concerned, look at the conditional. "If you ask the citizens," this just means that they will not to ask the citizens about anything that isn't trivial.
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.
Almost like that sleazy socialist idea of helping others, instead of taking what you want. One guy tried to make that popular. Long bearded hippy. I believe he is a South American. People wear his t-shirts, unknowing how many people died because of him.
Called Jesus, or something else Mexican.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
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 EU commissioners are chosen by the elected governments of each State just like U.S Senators were before the 13th amendment. Any proposed law has to be approved by the EU parliament which is directly elected. The big problem with the EU is that politicians have found it very easy to blame their failures on the "faceless EU technocrats" instead of owning up to them. Italian politicians even blamed the EU for the recent bridge collapse in Genoa
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.
80% of the votes where from Germany, probably because the main German public news website actually bothered to publish a story on this poll and provided links to the EU website. This is how I learned of it and why I participated.
If I hadn't read the article in the news, I would have had no idea.
I think you are confusing Socialism with Communism.
It is an easy mistake to make, because most people are ignorant idiots.
Socialism is in free market economies with democracy. However there are more regulations and wider government funding for public good initiatives.
While Communism is the government having direct control of everyone's lives.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Stop using facts!
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
Permanent Daylight savings time is nothing else than moving your time zones by one, or renaming 12 o'clock into 1 o'clock. In the end, it's the same with another name. Why not just get up one hour early? That's exactly what "permanent Daylight savings time" means.
I live in a "socialist" country and things aren't that bad.
The problem with socialism is that at some point, the government will run out of other people's money to spend.
When you run out of good arguments, there is always Thatcher to quote...
That is not what permanent Daylight Saving Time means.
For one, Daylight Saving Time (not SavingS) is when clocks move one hour forward, not backward, which means getting up one hour early is in the wrong direction. Daylight Saving Time has people waking up one hour later.
Second, and more importantly, Daylight Saving Time is when an entire geographic region coordinates its entire sociopolitical, economic, and manufacturing infrastructure (and their interdependencies) to shift production to be one hour later for a period of about 8 months. When Daylight Saving Time ends, all that infrastructure is then shifts its production to one hour earlier.
Saying "set your individual clock to be one hour later is the same as Daylight Saving Time" is like saying you can catch a plane earlier by simply moving your watch to be one hour later. Do that and you're going to miss your plane.
If you go in the other direction, you're going to end up wasting an hour at every single appointment you make, which I suppose is better than missing your plane..
In any case changing your personal clock ain't Daylight Saving Time. Daylight Saving Time is delaying an entire geographical area's political, social, and economic productivity by one hour.
blog
Permanent Daylight savings time is nothing else than moving your time zones by one, or renaming 12 o'clock into 1 o'clock. In the end, it's the same with another name. Why not just get up one hour early? That's exactly what "permanent Daylight savings time" means.
Because I have core hours that I have to be in the office for. So getting up an hour early does not mean I get to go home an hour earlier. It just means I have an extra hour at home before I go to the office. Not the same thing at all when businesses may not be open during that extra hour.