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EU Parliament Votes To End Daylight Savings (dw.com)

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the about-time dept.

The European Parliament on Tuesday voted with a large majority to end daylight savings time in the EU by 2021. From a report: Under the proposals, each member state would decide whether to continue with twice-a-year clock changes or stick permanently to summer or winter time. All 28 member states would need to inform the European Commission of their choice ahead of the proposed switch, by April 2020. They would then coordinate with the bloc's executive so that their decisions do not disrupt the functioning of the single market.

15 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. Yay but nay by bjoeg · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So we might finally end this, but only repeat history and head back into the chaos.
    One Thing was that DST was created to save energy, but was not adopted by all countries in the beginning. It was only back in 1996 whole of EU got DST standardized so all member would change clocks on the same dates.

    But now we are heading back into the chaos, where each member can decide which ever time they will implement. So we are back to pre-1996.

    1. Re:Yay but nay by Shaitan · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yes, get rid of daylight savings by all means but whatever the choice is make it uniform!

    2. Re:Yay but nay by Wycliffe · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Time zones make sense as you don't want my clock to be 5 minutes different than your time but the time itself should be set based on some concept of sunrise, sunset, or high noon. What you are really asking is "what time of day is it in X?" or even "will so-in-so be awake / at work?" If we just set people's timezone where 7am is always the approximate time of sunrise then this would answer this question fine and businesses can set schedules appropriately. Many businesses already have summer and winter hours so daylight savings time does nothing but complicates the communication.

      The different lengths of days doesn't really matter that much either as people still tend to be awake for the same number of hours regardless of season and if we are talking international, Australia has short days during the same time that Europe has long days. Better to just pick the timezone where your true sunrise is the closest to 7am and be done with it.

    3. Re:Yay but nay by gizmo71 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The problem is not the times you do stuff - it's that for half the worl, the date would suddenly change in the middle of the day. "It's my birthday! But only from 1pm today to 1pm the next day" fails a basic sanity check - the notion of 'today' becomes bunk.

    4. Re:Yay but nay by religionofpeas · · Score: 3, Funny

      Stop thinking that we somehow need to regulate our clocks to that yellow thing

      Right, we should all work 9-5 on UTC time, and if that means you work and play in the dark, and go to sleep in the light, so be it. Stop thinking that you need the sun to enjoy a nice day on the beach, or a hike in the mountains, when you can simply bring some flashlights with you.

    5. Re:Yay but nay by gmack · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Keep in mind that Spain is entirely in the wrong timezone It is south of the UK so it should be on the same timezone as the UK but instead it's on Central European time so 10-18 is actually 9-17. Also it's mainly only government offices that take 3h lunch breaks. At least in the Madrid area, the people who actually work for a living mainly get a 1h lunch break.

    6. Re: Yay but nay by Miamicanes · · Score: 5, Informative

      Technically, GMT is NOT the same as UTC. There are actually three different standards... GMT, UTC, and TAI.

      They differ because the precise length of an orbital & rotational year is neither 100% consistent nor predictable.

      GMT is defined by solar noon at the Greenwich Observatory in London. If observation reveals that we've wobbled by a few milliseconds, GMT changes to reflect that. It sounds nice in theory, but 99.999% of use cases honestly don't give a fuck whether solar noon at Greenwich happens a few hundred milliseconds (or entire seconds) early or late.

      TAI is kind of like Unix time, except it has much greater precision. It defines a second as a precise number of cesium-137 decay periods, a year as a precise number of seconds, and counts both as an offset from its starting point. TAI currently deviates from GMT by ~32 seconds.

      UTC was envisioned as a compromise between GMT and TAI. It adds and removes seconds to ensure that UTC's noon falls within a half second of Greenwich solar noon. It's also a royal pain in the ass to deal with, because unlike TAI, UTC is a historical moving target. 9:47:42 July 18, 1997 UTC is NOT precisely 8 years before 9:47:42 July 18, 2005 UTC (even accounting for leap year gymnastics), because a couple of seconds were added as well

      UTC makes a mess of things like timestamped logs, the same way DST does... but worse, because most people using UTC for timestamps are doing it PRECISELY to avoid the DST timestamp problem, and have no idea that "leap seconds" even EXIST until the first time they get burned by it.

      UTC-vs-TAI was exacerbated by the sudden popularity of using internet time protocol (NTP) to automatically set clocks on computers. In the past, people set the time, and let it go until they manually updated it at their own convenience. Leap seconds were rare to begin with during that era, and a second or two gain or loss when the computer got rebooted was lost in the greater disruption of the reboot itself.

      Fast forward to sometime around 2006, when UTC-via-NTP had become commonplace, and a leap second occurred, Linux computers all automatically observed it, and all hell broke loose when software that assumed that "UTC" behaved like TAI found itself with 2 seconds' worth of logged activity bearing the same timestamp (and often, undefined weirdness if computations involving milliseconds were involved on computers that did 64-bit timekeeping).

      As I understand the "Linux" problem, programmers want TAI-like behavior, but POSIX compliance explicitly requires UTC... switching Linux to TAI would require changes to POSIX to allow timestamps to unambiguously indicate whether they're UTC or TAI, and the current 32-second difference is too big to just sweep under a rug and ignore. So instead, we have a complicated system where computers use NTP to sync up to TAI, then the OS converts TAI to UTC and adds/removes leap seconds before exposing it as the leap-second-mangled offset from midnight January 1, 1970 for consumption by programs that don't actually CARE about the precise moment of solar noon @ Greenwich.

      The proposed solution is almost worse... ending leap seconds in UTC (to avoid rewriting POSIX & everything it dictates, causing YEARS of insidious bugs in the process), and inventing a FOURTH standard to do what UTC currently does & keep astronomers happy.

      Compounding matters even more is disagreement about how to handle the leap seconds we already have. If UTC retroactively wipes them out, we're back to the problem of ambiguity with "UTC" timestamps between the 1980s and present... no way to indicate whether it's a "legacy" UTC timestamp or a "revised" one. If it doesn't, we'll still have to deal with those legacy timestamps in perpetuity.

      The net result is that we're likely stuck with UTC and dealing with leap seconds in Linux for at least another decade or two. My guess is that POSIX will be left alone, UTC will eventually stop adding leap seconds (but leave the existing ones as-is), and they'll come up with a new standard for Astronomers to take the place of UTC.

    7. Re:Yay but nay by Gavagai80 · · Score: 3, Informative

      And without official timezones, every business can decide for itself, which will cause a lot more confusion and chaos.

      If you were right, it would cause the end of all rush hour traffic congestion, which would be wonderful.

      But back in the real world, most businesses are going to set their hours to be daylight hours since that's when their customers and employees will want to be awake. And back in the real world every business already decides for themselves what their hours are. Many people start work at 7, 8, 9am with no real dominant standard starting time. People talk as "9 to 5" were a standard, but the mean work start time is actually 8:18 (in USA+Europe, source). Which is why it's really more like rush 3 hours instead of rush hour. Clock time really has zilch current influence on when employers set their working hours right now, it would not change if we went to UTC.

      --
      This space intentionally left blank
    8. Re:Yay but nay by Calydor · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yeah, let's abolish time zones so we have no way of knowing whether the guys in the offices in California, New York, London, and Tokyo are at work or not! That will fix ALL the chaos in our global community!

      --
      -=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
  2. End DST? I think not. by CrimsonAvenger · · Score: 3, Insightful

    No, allowing each member State to decide whether to have permanent Standard Time, permanent Summer Time, or continue to switch as always is NOT "ending DST".

    If you want to end DST, then you need to find a set of choices that does NOT include "change clocks twice a year"....

    --

    "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
  3. Why not split the difference? by pollarda · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It is interesting that you donâ(TM)t see a proposal to split the difference by adjusting our clocks by only 1/2 hour and leaving them there.

  4. Everybody hates it by spaceyhackerlady · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What problem does it solve? If any? Ditch it and save the time, money and hassle. I've been to places that have better things to worry about. Not just tropical places where the length of the day doesn't vary anyway, but also Arizona (UTC-7 all year) and Saskatchewan (UTC-6 all year).

    Everybody hates it. Why is it taking so long?

    ...laura

    1. Re:Everybody hates it by Sir_Eptishous · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If we move to permanent DST, my sunrise will be around 10 am in the winter. I'll hate that more than spending a few minutes changing the clocks.

      Too fucking bad.
      I'll take dark mornings over having my body clock changed twice a year.

      --
      We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
    2. Re:Everybody hates it by omfglearntoplay · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Really, 1 hour is nothing to adjust to... it takes all of a couple of days if anything. If you think adjusting an hour twice a year is bad, I guess you never travel to another timezone. Nothing is more hellish than being 5+ or 10+ hours off your internal clock, yet people do it frequently and the body will adjust soon enough.

  5. Re: Permanent DST is a mistake as well. by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 4, Insightful

    3 am or 4 am sunrise hardly makes a difference if you want to sleep until 7 or 8 am. Get some good curtains if the light bothers you.

    The problem isn't so much that the sunlight interfers with your sleep, as you waste daylight hours asleep and then are active after sunset in the dark. It's better if you get up earlier and have more daylight at the end of the day, hence, daylight savings time. I've particularly noticed this advantage as I've gotten older and my night vision has deteriorated; I very much appreciate having daylight to see by in the evenings.