by caiobegotti on 11/30/23, 5:11 PM with 248 comments
by steveBK123 on 11/30/23, 8:11 PM
Splitting & re-groupings are almost arbitrary and have no consideration for politics, business and culture.
Ireland & N. Ireland in different TZ? France & Corsica in different TZ? Pushing Ireland & Portugal into their own TZ and calling it Azores time? Bringing UK into alignment with Spain/France/Belgium/Netherlands, but pushing Germany/Italy/Switzerland into alignment with Eastern Europe countries but out of alignment with Western Europe?
A 2 step process by which some countries change TZ twice? Would love to write the code for that mess.
by highmastdon on 11/30/23, 6:29 PM
Reasons
- criminality is lower when there's longer light
- earlier darkness leads to more accidents. It's better to have longer darkness after the masses are RESTED (in the morning), opposed to when they're TIRED (in the evening)
- longer day-time for office workers, is more productive
- shorter time of year that has long after noon darkness. As humans are using artificial light to stay up longer, it's better to align the time of day with that
by simbolit on 11/30/23, 6:07 PM
(2) the proposed time zones are really impractical, not necessarily in principle, but in their specific implementation. Germany-Netherlands in different time zones is strange, Dublin and Belfast in different time zones is stupid, Athens and Crete in different time zones is absurd.
by NeoTar on 11/30/23, 6:44 PM
But otherwise I am warm to the proposal. Some tweaks would make it more practical/politically acceptable (keep Portugal and Ireland on the Western Time Zone, don't split up Greece from the islands).
by mongol on 11/30/23, 9:23 PM
If someone prefers brighter mornings and darker afternoons, and someone else the opposite, the solution is easy. Adapt your life to follow that. Don't expect the time to suit you, it is keeping track over the sun's trajectory over the sky, not your life.
by pmontra on 11/30/23, 6:46 PM
> The Time Use Initiative (TUI) is the main non-profit organisation promoting the right to time all over the world. Its main objective is to encourage public discussion on how we collectively organise our time, seen as a way to improve citizen’s well-being through innovative time policies.
So this is not a proposal from an EU department, but it's a proposal to the EU. For sure they "encourage public discussion" as the comments here on HN demonstrate.
by stavros on 11/30/23, 6:16 PM
That's terrible.
by theodric on 11/30/23, 6:15 PM
Well done.
by alentred on 11/30/23, 7:37 PM
Probably, there is also some analysis paralysis: it is just hard to chose between keeping the winter or the summer time. Just look at this thread: morning birds cannot agree with night owls, someone leaving a bit to the west disagrees with those leaving in the east of the same country...
I wish we'd just settle on any choice. At this point I care much less about "winter vs summer time", more about abolishing DST itself. Twice a year I have a small jet lag for nothing.
by irdc on 11/30/23, 6:18 PM
by mcnesium on 12/1/23, 10:23 AM
In Germany, there are 16 states. Many of them have different laws, e.g. regarding store hours and so on. Neighboring countrys like Austria or Poland have even more conservative laws.
The difference between sunrise and sunset in Palermo and Oslo is almost 90 minutes twice a year.
There are tons of cultural differences between Europeans. In southern countries, people tend to stay up later in the evening and sleep longer in the morning than in northern countries (at least that is my impression from traveling).
In the continental United States, there are four time zones, none of which even pay much attention to state borders.
Still, everyone manages to live their lives, talk to people on the phone, commute from one place to the other.
So why are Europeans so afraid that the people they talk to might be an hour or two off?
by roflmaostc on 11/30/23, 6:21 PM
You do it only twice per year. But how often do you stay late up because of an event or whatever. And how often do you travel to another time zone, sometimes even >6 hours.
I think the latter effects outweigh the health impact of clock alignment significantly.
by Dylan16807 on 11/30/23, 6:23 PM
by gizajob on 11/30/23, 7:08 PM
by bouke on 11/30/23, 6:11 PM
by enz on 11/30/23, 9:37 PM
by RamblingCTO on 11/30/23, 9:08 PM
by Erratic6576 on 11/30/23, 9:04 PM
So if after the switch you are supposed to start an hour earlier, you just start one hour later, thus starting at the same time according to the sun.
This might sound crazy but the craziness of making people switch clocks is evil and cruel
by tgsovlerkhgsel on 11/30/23, 10:30 PM
Meanwhile, I bet most even don't understand the effect of DST (minimizing how much the clock-time of sunrise varies, at the cost of increasing how much the clock-time of sunset varies, https://coolinfographics.com/blog/2012/11/6/daylight-savings...)
by Freak_NL on 11/30/23, 6:32 PM
by AndyMcConachie on 11/30/23, 6:10 PM
I'm in The Netherlands and after this Germany will be in a different time zone than me. That's not cool.
by lloda on 11/30/23, 6:17 PM
by kinnth on 11/30/23, 10:04 PM
by mklepaczewski on 11/30/23, 8:24 PM
by trabant00 on 11/30/23, 6:41 PM
by yafbum on 11/30/23, 7:18 PM
by Halan on 11/30/23, 9:00 PM
by charlieyu1 on 11/30/23, 6:39 PM
by odiroot on 11/30/23, 8:48 PM
On the other hand, I'm glad to have Central European TZ.
by rvba on 11/30/23, 7:40 PM
by seydor on 11/30/23, 6:42 PM
Why don't we reduce working hours to 7 also
by jurschreuder on 11/30/23, 9:26 PM
by Halan on 11/30/23, 6:22 PM
by salmonfamine on 11/30/23, 10:04 PM
Currently, partly due to a historical legacy of railroads, time-zones are longitudinal. That is, they help standardize time (and daylight hours) across east-west distances.
However, given that the number of daylight hours is even more starkly affected by north-south latitudinal differences, we should also implement time-zones in that direction. After all, what does "12:15am" really mean if its dark in London and sunny in Reykjavik?
So, in order to standardize daylight hours, we could implement north-south time-zones as well, producing time-offsets for each lat/long cell on the globe. We could standardize the number of daylight hours in a given 24-hour period (using the equator as reference) and standardize each cell to have the same number of daylight hours.
In order to do so, we would simply have to redefine what a "second" is (or really, all time measurements.) So, the further north you go during the summer, the shorter a "second" becomes (so as to preserve the same number of "seconds" per time-cell) whereas in the winter you would have the opposite effect. Therefore this also has the interesting consequence of changing the duration of all time measurements seasonally, with a greater delta the further away from the equator you are (a "second" would always have the same duration at the equator.) So the further away you are from the equator, the quicker the duration of time changes with respect to equatorial time as time passes seasonally. Still with me?
Good, because we can do even better! Why even have time cells? Time-zones were implemented as lines on a map because that was the technology that was available at the time. But now that we have the internet, we can instead standardize an algorithm that could be implemented into all RTC chips and run on reference servers a la atomic clocks. So instead of "crossing over" into the next time cell, all of your time measurements would be sped-up or slowed-down proportionally to your GPS-measured latitude (standardized to some number of significant digits.)
So all analog clocks would immediately be rendered useless -- unless you are exactly on the equator -- and we would live in a world where you could speed up time by running north, but only in the summer.
If you've made it this far without throwing your laptop/phone out of the nearest window in rage, thank you for your patience (and welcome to the time grid!)
by amai on 11/30/23, 8:08 PM
"During the Second World War, Western European states were forced to adopt Central European Time by Hitler and Franco. After the war, this was not revoked, leaving the Western European states at a disadvantage to the Central European states due to the detrimental effects of misaligned clocks."
https://timeuse.barcelona/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/proposa...
by janice1999 on 11/30/23, 6:50 PM
by rldjbpin on 12/1/23, 10:37 AM
just getting rid of dst seems most reasonable to me but iirc it has been prposed before without any success.
if the world is still ok with adjusting with time like taking 6 hour flights twice every year, then so be it.
by datadrivenangel on 11/30/23, 6:02 PM
Step 1: All EU countries abolish the clock change to DST in spring and remain on the clock time they use in winter. For those countries whose recommended time zone is their current standard time, no further steps need to be taken.
Step 2: Those countries whose recommended time zone is not yet their current standard time, additionally turn back their clocks one last time by one hour in autumn, in order to adopt their recommended time zone as their new standard time."
I really wish we could do this in the US.
by riffic on 11/30/23, 7:49 PM
by jonathankoren on 11/30/23, 6:24 PM
If you’re going to abolish it, this is the way. None of this permanent summertime nonsense.
by amai on 11/30/23, 7:53 PM
by dirtybirdnj on 11/30/23, 8:04 PM