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EU To Stop Changing the Clocks in October 2019 (dw.com)
European Commissioner for Transport Violeta Bulc last week announced that the EU will stop the twice-yearly changing of clocks across the continent in October 2019. From a report: The practice, which was used as a means to conserve energy during the World Wars as well as the oil crises of the 1970s, became law across the bloc in 1996. All EU countries are required to move forward by an hour on the last Sunday of March and back by an hour on the final Sunday in October. Bulc said EU member states would have until April 2019 to decide whether they would permanently remain on summer or winter time. [...] "In order to maintain a harmonised approach we are encouraging consultations at national levels to ensure a coordinated approach of all member states," Bulc said.
The decision to tackle the issue was prompted after the Commission launched an online survey. Some 4.6 million Europeans answered the survey -- three million of those respondents were from Germany -- with 80 percent of them voting to scrap the practice .
Let's go for Double-Dutch Daylight Savings - permanently!!
(RIP Tommy)
#DeleteChrome
DST is a waste of time. Now it is time for the U.S. to do the same.
October 2018 (obviously impossible) would have enshrined this into the UK transitional period too. Haven't heard anything about what the UK will do - am really hoping we stop changing as well.
I responded to the survey voting for 'stop changing', so I'm happy with this.
Every European country will decide whether they do it or not. Some countries are still hesitating.
How hard is it to use the phrase "daylight saving"?
- Chuq
Oh, this is about daylight savings time. I thought they wanted to dial them back to 1941.
Never mind.
Have gnu, will travel.
Problem solved.
In Scotland they'll be set to Scotch Time and in NI they'll be set to Whiskey Time, of course.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You're a Slashdot reader. I heard about it from here.
messing with daylight saving. I don't mind if you have daylight saving, or if you don't, just stop changing you mind!
And in the middle of winter, when you go far enough north, the sun sets early enough that even with an extra hour of daylight at the end of it, it will still be after sunset by the time most people might need to go home from work.
And if the sun is rising that much later in the winter, the lack of any sunlight in the morning almost certainly badly affect melatonin cycles and probably worsen seasonal depression disorder.
I can sympathize with wanting an extra hour of daylight in the evenings, but as soon as you get more than about 45 degrees away from the equator or so, the sun is already rising late enough as it is in the winter months, and in practice, one wouldn't be able to enjoy the extra hour of daylight at the end of the day in the winter either, because they would probably be at work until sunset anyways.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that we leave DST as it is, I think that the abomination should be abolished forever, but I firmly believe that we should stay on standard time, and not simply shift the middle of the day to 1PM. You might be able to convince me to shift clocks forward only half an hour only once, and one last time to split the difference, but I don't know if I've been really sold on that yet.
Noon should be as close as is reasonably possible to the middle of the day, not an hour before it (or else you may as well call it 12AM, considering what AM and PM mean, since that is what it would always be if we settled on using DST year-round).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I consider myself a "purist" and wish that we'd just stop using DST completely and just go with "winter" time year-round.
The more south you go, the less "saving" daylight is needed since there's less daylight variance between the seasons.
The more north you go the more "extreme" sunrises would get if you use "summer" time (DST) in the winter. Once you get into longitude 40N range (NYC, Detroit, Toronto), if you use 'summer time' in the winter you get sunrise at 8:30. Sunsets will be at 5:30 instead of 4:30, and that's hardly worth much IMHO.
We have electrical lights now: is it that big of a deal that it gets dark "sooner"? The last time it was really dark in an urban area was giant 2003 blackout. I'd rather have earlier sunrises, as otherwise people's circadian rhythms are going to all sorts of fucked up (especially dangerous while driving).
so think of all the scheduling software... update it all for 2019... not going to happen
this is just a bureaucracy of consultations... what do you think they will be doing... paying themselves and ?
lets say germany changed and france was delayed by 2 years... do you think business would not suffer ?
it requires all member states to change then updates to all software that keeps the time, no matter how lofty the goal it just is not going to happen.
regards
John Jones
Hande hoch!
First ze big hand hoch zen ze little hand hoch!
For you ze DST ist ofer.
I heard about it earlier and had an idea for how I wanted to vote but then I forgot about it until they revealed the result.
With 80% German votes clearly coverage has been bigger in Germany than elsewhere.
4(?) million people, 80% Germans = 3.2 million Germans.
3.9% of German population voted if that's the case.
0.2% of the rest of the EU population.
Yay...
Set the clocks to optimize for winter, and just be done with it.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Nothing unique about Luxembourg or Benelux. Britain has numerous overseas territories (Cayman Islands, Channel Islands) that are autonomous enough that, although they depend on the home country for their continued existence, there just doesn't seem to be anything anyone can do pierce banking privacy laws and tax shelters. France has Monaco. The USA has Delaware and Texas.
Nobody is stupid enough to actually strangle the classes that create wealth by not giving them a foot out of the tax door, so to speak.
Have gnu, will travel.
just go forward 30 mins, and leave it there pemently.. best of both worlds.
I fully support ending the time changes, but using daylight savings time year-round is idiotic. That is just setting noon to 1PM. If we do this in the US, sunrise in New York will be about 8AM in the winter. Although the name implies it, daylight saving time does not actually make the day longer.
I would love for Brisbane to have DST. Especially now I have school age kids.
I can be flexible with my work hours. Less so for my kids school hours.
and move their timezone to GMT. they currently sit on gmt + 2, which does not suit thir geography (it was done on the whim of a dictator to "show support for germany").
That, coupled with their weird times (3 hour lunch break starting at two) wreacks havoc on bussiness with the rest of europe, and the world...
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Since they take the hour away from us in the middle of the night, they are saving nighttime---not daylight.
It is called daylight saving time in the US because it avoids confusion with the similarly-named "summertime" (referring to the time between spring and autumn). This may not be an issue with other languages.
It's a PITA every year. Just set it and forget it! Old Indian chief once said...only white man think he could cut bottom of blanket, sew onto top and have longer blanket!
From the article:
Bulc said EU member states would have until April 2019 to decide whether they would permanently remain on summer or winter time.
Wow. I get ditching DST, but make a call one way or the other across the board. This will get messy..
Nobody is stupid enough to actually strangle the classes that create wealth by not giving them a foot out of the tax door, so to speak.
Nitpick - they don't create wealth, they're merely major redistributors of wealth. They're the pumps, not the sources.
Indeed, it seems pretty reasonable. Now if it was more contested, perhaps it would make to sense to consider a national-population weighted poll (akin to EP seat allocation), but in fact I think the poll returned consistently high support from ALL but 2 countries (Greece and Cyprus), so even if German votes were ignored the result would be same. There seems some fuss about countries individually choosing summer/winter time, but that is perfectly appropriate and respectful of nations (or regions, like Corsica)... and isn't functionally different from countries choosing their own time zone, which they have always done, which I think many fail to grasp in focus on choice of winter vs summer. Curious to see if former WET re-emerges in at least some of Spain/France/Benelux. It would be weird if the UK was 1 hour east of France at least half the year, but AFAIK support for dropping clock adjustment is equally high in the UK, and no reason to thing there would be stranger result than when countries designated this completely independently. Well, maybe that was bad luck to write that :-).
Look, it took only a decade of pressure and a public petition with a majority reminiscent of old soviet style elections to strong-arm our politicians into doing one simple thing right.
There may still be hope for this planet. At this speed, somewhere around 2350 they will decide that climate change is actually a bad thing and they ought to do something about it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Winters are already miserable and shitty enough without suffering it getting dark at 4:30 in the afternoon. I think most people with the exception of farmers won't mind if there is an hour's more darkness at the beginning of the day instead.
this is gonna be a bigger mess than daylightsaving itself.. I really hope they set it to wintertime, as summertime is murder, a lot of studies shown that summertime is contra our bio rhythm, but leave it up to moronic politicians to go against those studies and choose summertime, because they think that's cool..
The European Economic Area countries usually follow the regulation by the European Union anyway. Excluding those, the non-EU countries left on the continent are basically Switzerland, Ukraine, Belarus, the Balkan states, and some city states (I don't count Russia and Turkey). Belarus is in the same timezone as western Russia, while the rest follow Central European Time or Eastern European Time. I'd expect everyone but Belarus to discard DST for practical reasons if the rest of the countries in the CET and EET blocks switch.
So although I agree that the European Union doesn't span the continent, in practice the entire continent except Belarus will probably end up getting rid of DST in the near future.
They 100% do create wealth. It's like saying we don't create cars, we just redistribute all the metals and plastics that make up the car.
As someone who lives in the Northern US, I would prefer that we stay on DST all the time. I don't mind driving to work in the dark in the winter months, but it's a bummer to drive home, again, in the dark. Staying on DST in the winter would alleviate that to some degree.
For example daylight on January 1st will be from 08:51 to 17:42. Getting home before dark just doesn't happen for me as I work ~08:30 to ~17:30 but on DST those daylight hours would be from 09:51 to 18:42! That means I can actually use a small amount of daylight after work. Now, compare that to abandoning DST and how it impacts the summer months.
July 1st this year under DST daylight was from 05:30 to 21:03. That's a long day, but 5:30 AM is also a somewhat reasonable time to be awake in my opinion. Without DST July 1st daylight would have been 04:30 to 20:03. I don't know anyone who would make use of the extra hour in the morning while everyone I know still enjoys that extra hour in the evening.
Let's keep DST and just never switch back!
Nobody is stupid enough to actually strangle the classes that create wealth by not giving them a foot out of the tax door, so to speak.
If you're rich, paying taxes is the equivalent of 'being strangled', it follows that in order to avoid the life threatening injury of having slightly less money, the rich must do what they have to in order to survive. They have to evade taxes, otherwise they wouldn't be able to keep breathing.
Whereas, if you are middle or working class, you are used to living with little to no money (and a lot of debt), therefore paying taxes is totally safe for you, it won't hurt you in any way.
Can you even imagine a society in which tax law is actually enforced, a society in which the insanely rich are moderately impaired in their ability to get insanely richer? It simply wouldn't work.
in order to avoid the life threatening injury of having slightly less money
Rich people will always be able to afford the dues at Mar-a-Lago. That comes out of discretionary income. What they can't afford is some local taxing authority shaving just enough off their businesses bottom line to make relocation to a cheaper jurisdiction beneficial.
Whereas, if you are middle or working class
You are stuck here behind an economic Iron Curtain. You can't move your income and you must shop at the company store. That being the market segment created by regulations, supposedly to protect you. But actually put in place to keep you from buying Canadian drugs or a Porsche from a German dealership.
Have gnu, will travel.