Poland pushes for EU to scrap daylight saving time

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As a programmer, DST creates tons of bugs for anything using time and is annoying. But whatever, I guess I get paid either way.
As a parent, DST is miserable. It's miserable as an adult, also, but multiplied misery when you have to get up early to ruin your kid's sleep. And then that night they're not ready to suddenly go to sleep an hour early so you lose an extra hour...
I hope Poland succeeds.
- the act of changing clocks twice a year is profoundly fucked up to people’s circadian rhythms .
  as well as the government deciding for you, what time it is, is kind of orwellian when i think about it.
  i want my body to adapt naturally to the sync of the sun, i think we all could use a little bit more nature.
- Yea people don't realize there are several different start/ends to it all over the world, not just 1 "everyone change it" and tons of special cases too. Terrible
- Programmer as well and fuck that shit.
  My cats are used to a very specific schedule.. now they're gonna wake me up 1 hour early for the next many weeks. Great!
  
  I wonder if the sleep-change fucks up our brains and that's why more people aren't upset about it.
  Until this comment, I'd completely forgotten about how the most recent time-change messed up me and the puppy I've been training, because of course she needs to pee as soon as she wakes up at 6am every day...
- As a programmer, I would never put anything except UTC or Unix time into a computer program or database. The front end can show the user whatever localized bullshit they want to see.
  
  Most of the time, yes, but not always. Sometimes you actually need local time stored rather than UTC. Simple example: alarm clock. User wants to be waken up at 7:00. No matter if it is summer time or winter time. Even if they travels to a different time zone - still will want to be waken up in the morning. If we store this time as UTC much more unnecessary and error-prone conversions will be needed. Similar issues may arise with other calendar events. Of course, at some point this will be converted to UTC for comparison with actual point in time.
  
  But if you consume data from something not in utc and need to get it there, there is still room for bugs.
  I changed our systems a previous job to store all in utc and got made to put it back to jst (Japan). That was .... Fun
- Ain't that right. Going through it with our first this week and I get it. Of course the little guy is ticked off. He's feeling all of the confusion and tiredness we are without knowing or enjoying any of the benefits.
- Every year when the clocks change people are cranky and start demanding this kind of thing be eliminated. Politicians capitalize on it and say they will do something about it. In a couple of weeks everyone forgets about it.
  In the end, the government can't do anything about the tilt of the Earth and there is no time system that can be devised that will make everyone happy. Many people like having more light in the evening and wouldn't be happy if DST were eliminated. People are going to be cranky for a couple of weeks in the year but it's generally considered worth putting up with so people have more daylight in the evening rather than having it before they wake up.
  
  We can get rid of DST while keeping that extra hour if we default to summer time, not winter. DST statistically causes many accidents twice a year, because our brains aren't ready / thrown off their rhythm, so making away with it would have a positive impact outside of not being cranky anymore

Last time there was a vote and most people wanted to remain in DST permanently. Somehow then the whole thing just died out. I don’t think it’s ever gonna happen

DST seems to be such a mess. We should start doing it state by state if EU doesn't want to do it all at the same time. Poland should lead the way and be the first

Everyone wants this and it's taking decades....
- Sure, but then the question is: Winter time or summer time?
  I'm not sure if the European people are equally united in this question.
  
  Summer time. Every time. I'd rather it not be pitch black at 4pm where I am. I'd rather take the extra bit of darkness in the morning.
  I also love it being 9pm in June and still having near full daylight ❤️
  
  Science says winter. If you want to wake up earlier to compensate you can just do that.
  
  I think we should stop calling it winter and summer time because it's swaying people wrong. Because of course we hate short, dark and cold days and we love long, warm, bright evenings. We love the summer, therefore if we choose summer time it feels like it'll be summer all year long.
  But the reality is that (at least where I live) winter time is closer to the sun time and would be preferable in all aspects.
  
  12 is at suns zenith, done.
  If we want to adjust our working hours, we can do that, no need to change the clock itself.
  
  Split the difference. Done.
  
  Split the difference and move forward or backward by 30 minutes only to insure that absolutely no one is ever happy.
  
  There's no such thing as "Summer time". What we have during winter is the astronomical time. Otherwise, I don't know whether I have a preference. I guess we could switch them up every other year or so, in order to sunset any confusion in the morning.
  
  I don't know if many people share my opinion, but I literally don't care one bit. Let's all do UTC across the world, the US needs to be taken down a peg anyway.
  
  Personally I really don't care which, though it would be nice if there was some kind of consistency throughout Europe and not having e.g. France and Germany in one time zone but Netherlands or Belgium in another.
  If I was dictator I think it seems reasonable to draw lines west and east of Germany, maybe Poland can be included in Germany's zone too.
  A wild idea would be to have the lines cross through countries so they're actually "correct" and the EU is seen as a whole entity rather than just individual countries, but that's probably quite impossible/impractical. Beautiful in a way though, surely a man can dream.
  
  They're not. Not at all. That's why all the previous attempts to abolish time changes failed.
  
  Doesn't matter. If the difference of 12:00 to natural noon is small just don't care, if it's large then a 9 to 5 can be an 11 to 7 where's the fucking problem, we can all switch to one zone and be fine.
  
  I always say it's pretty simple: scrap DST and shift timezone by 30 minutes. It may not be pretty if every observing country did not the same, but there are already countries using this system, like India.
  
  Summer time of course.
- I very never heard anyone discussing this in real life outside of maybe 6 days a year. Much less so since smartphones became people's primary clocks since they auto adjust.
  People also don't agree on which time should be kept.
  
  6 days a year is quite a bit, but also the frequency at which it comes up in conversation is not really relevant to whether people want/don't want?
- I've never been bothered by the time changing twice a year, why do people want to abolish it so much?
  
  It leads to statistically significant increases in human death, injury, and financial loss due to stress caused by disruptions to circadian rhythm. The question you should be asking is "why do we still do it despite this, when there is literally no benefit?"
  
  Yes, I suffer greatly every time. My inner clock is very strong and is not willing to adapt.

Instead of DST, why didn't we just shift working hours one hour earlier in winter? (I am in favor of getting rid of DST. I'm just asking why we decided to shift the clock instead of shifting working hours)
- Changing working hours would be decided by individual businesses and inconsistencies on this would be a logistical nightmare. Delivery of materials are suddenly an hour later and you have a bunch of people standing around with nothing to do. Or maybe it's earlier than usual and it comes before your business is open.
  Signage about business hours would have to be changed twice per year. A customer not aware of the change in business hours may show up too early or two late.
  And it would be an insane amount of work to change all the schedules of automated systems to conform with business hour changes that happen twice per year.
  So to avoid these kinds of problems you need the entire society to change their schedules consistently. It's easier to change the clocks than to change everything other than the clocks.
  
  And yet, flex hours somehow exist anyway. It depends on the job.
  
  Seasonal opening hours are not something new.
  
  Cool, that makes sense. Thanks for the reply!

I had such high hopes back in 2018, I think France was pushing for it. Now 7 years later with still no progress I think the best bet is to move to China, India, Russia or Hawaii, or any African country except Egypt. Or South America except Chile. You see the overwhelming majority of people in the world don't have the DST bullshit.
- India? You mean the "+05:30" timezone? I'd rather not deal with that :30 tbh. I like having my timezone arithmetics quite simple, just adding and subtracting hours. A half hour offset is worse to me than having to switch which offsets to use when. (Still better than Australia Central Western with its +08:45, but that's a low bar to clear.)

YES! Get rid of that dumb shit!
Not sure what programmers have to say about this though. Ideally DST would've been scrapped like 30 years ago back when there were a lot fewer people using computers, so a lot of code wouldn't need updating as soon as such a change is implemented, but waiting will only worsen it.
I think keeping summertime is the better option. Having a bit of sunlight when you come home from school or work in winter would be priceless. Even if it means darker mornings.
- If the EU abolishes DST in its member states, there won't be any patches or updates necessary to software out there. The timezone database will simply be updated to reflect the change of policy and bam, once your system has the new tzdata, restart your apps and they will automatically understand it. This is not like the Y2K bug that needed actual patches.
  
  Unless the software implemented timezones wrong, for example as tz column in the database with a signed integer. This breaks as soon as you have 30 min Timezone offsets, or try to compare north earth timezones vs south earth timezones where the change between summer and wintertime 2 months apart.
  Ask me how I know 🫠
  
  There are lots of systems (embedded, mostly offline, abandoned by its vendor) which are not easily upgradeable and their timezone database cannot be easily replaced. Not everything is a PC getting its regular software update.
- Hi, I'm a software developer. DST is a nightmare because it makes the clock jump (skip an hour in one direction, meaning there are wall clock times which don't exist, or backwards, meaning there are wall clock times that exist twice). I don't care whether we will settle on summer or winter time but please, just don't make it jump.
  
  As a software dev myself: if time in your application's internals jumps on DST, something has been implemented incorrectly. That's what zone information is for, to make times uniquely identifiable and timers run the correct length. Getting the implementation right is hard, though. So, abolishing DST is very well worth it.
- I think keeping summertime is the better option. Having a bit of sunlight when you come home from school or work in winter would be priceless. Even if it means darker mornings.
  This is why I doubt we'll get rid of it. A majority of people seem to dislike dst but not for the same reasons. I get up around 6. That already means about 3 hours of darkness during winter mornings as is. And in the afternoon I'm indoors anyway because it's cold. It'd be more convenient for me to sacrifice an hour of daylight on summer evenings. Then again the sun rising around 4 would be kind of a waste.
  
  Just do it like the chinese do it:
  Width of 4 time zones all on Beijing time. (most eastern)
  So companies in center/west just shift their business hours instead.
  Nobody says your company has to open at 8h, starting at 10 is perfectly legal!
- Not sure what programmers have to say about this though.
  DST is a major pain in the butt, getting rid of it simplifies a lot of things. Only problem is that everything still needs to take DST into account for all of history.
- I like the switches, more sunlight is better!
  
  It's not like there's more sunlight, it's just offsetting where in the day you get the most sunlight. Turn the clock back and you get sunlight earlier in the day, and turn the clock forward you get more sunlight in the afternoon/evening.
  As someone living just north enough in Denmark, winters are brutal depending on your job, and I've mostly had factory-like jobs where I spent most days inside without sunlight, so I'd drive to work in darkness, spend most of the day in artificial light, no windows, and then drive home in darkness.
  
  You do realize, the sun isn't hanging in there for an hour longer, just because we on earth made a change to some kind of time keeping device? We will still have 24h hours a day and the sun will still shine the amount of time it shines.
  Edit: I see a couple of downvotes. Could some one give some arguments?

I we were in true democracies that thing would have been scrapped long ago. Not a single person like it or see any actual purpose on it.
- That's true, no-one likes it. But the attempts to end it got stuck on democracy, unfortunately. People were inable to get behind one solution. Some countries prefered to keep the natural time, some wanted the summer time. There are reasons for both approaches and lots and lots of emotions. It was unreasonable to let different EU countries addopt different time systems, so the whole idea to get rid of the time changes was scrapped.
  
  Weirdly, I've heard people here in Iceland (where we never had DST) who want to adopt it. It never made sense to me. If we want to shift our day around the sun, let's just agree as a society to shift business opening hours during the summer.
  
  I don't really see the issue. Many different countries already have different timezones. Spain for instance have different timezone than Portugal.

Last push ended because of COVID. What's it going to be this time, Bird Flu or Texan Measels?
- WWIII and no time to deprogram the military infrastructure aka MaaS to not adjust savings time.

Overslept for gaming session this year again. DST should have been abolished decades ago!

Fingers crossed

Living in eastern Japan for a decade, I don't miss changing the clocks and the misery around that time. I do wish east Japan would move by an hour, though; before 4am sunrises (getting light from 3-something) and dark before 5pm in the winter sucks.

I call bullshit. they've gotten rid of daylight savings and the 12-hour clock in most of Asia, but it'll never happen in Europe. democracy doesn't work like that. bullshit
- Seems like EU members are currently mostly split on whether to keep summer time or the other the default (so the current system will stay)
  
  Could they not move it to a halfway point between the two?
  
  Just keep whichever time lets us sleep one more hour before doing away with it, instead of losing an hour.
  Obviously I'm not a farmer, but I probably wouldn't care much for DST if that was the case anyway.

YES! LET'S GO!

Actually I quite like it. You get daylight in the morning in winter, and longer evenings in the summer.
Without DST you have to choose between: in winter you go to work in the dark and come home in the dark, meaning you don't see any daylight apart from at weekends, which is especially depressing if you work in a place short on windows; OR you waste a bunch of daylight in the summer mornings and have shorter evenings when the weather is warmer and it's nicer to be outside.
I am a programmer. Not sure why this would be a problem. Just fix the computers to GMT+X and for the most part it won't matter. It's not as if I have to rewrite DST code every few months.
- in winter you go to work in the dark and come home in the dark, meaning you don't see any daylight apart from at weekends,
  That's already my reality as it stands
  
  Nordic detected
- The issue is more with embedded systems which have been hard coded to European DST.
  Most sane software will use the OS timezone and not care about DST. Most sane embedded systems will have some config for DST. I bet there are lots of cranky unsupported things which are horribly broken though.

We want to stay in summer time though, right? Right?
- We need to reach a consensus on that across EU. Allow for a few decades, then we can make an informed decision and start to plan how to proceed.
- Either, just as long as we stop the switch twice a year

Meanwhile, Ohio wants to keep DST as their standard which is infuriating.
I understand wanting more light in the northern hemisphere early in the day. It adds safety for school children mostly in the winter months, but I don't understand why we can't just change the start and end times of school to coordinate more light at those crucial times of day.
- Who gives a fuck about ohio?
  
  Who the fuck cares about DST? My bad for sharing an opinion on the internet, but go ahead and keep hating from across the pond.
- DST would lead to less light in the morning, more in the afternoon, if they keep it year round. Winter is already standard time.
  Personally, I prefer DST for the additional light in the afternoon. Maybe the start time of every school and employer could be changed to be an hour earlier with Standard Time, but sounds a lot easier to just keep DST year round.
- Thankyou, I thought I was crazy because no one else sees this most obvious solution. Why do we need DST at all? If you are a farmer or a school or whatever then just change your start time as necessary. Changing the time itself for everyone twice a year is a daft approach.

YEEEES

Really don't get the issue about keeping it? Its just a small adaptation, which should not bother anyone? A simple change every now and then keeps you flexible right, just go with the flow, and stop being bothered about such a small thing 😉
- It causes a lot of unnecessary costs, it causes a lot of unnecessary stress (literally kills a bunch of people every year), ...
  Why keep it?
  
  What are these costs? And how come shifting an hour kills people?? Stress?? Cant be just that??Having these discussions every year possibly causes more stress than just following the clock shifting? I don't recall my parents ever having issues with dst or complain about dst more than the first morning when the clock shifted forward? Just trolling a bit, but for myself I really dont see the issue, except for the discussions every half year.
- I spent months coding this shit into our programs and it still has issues. It makes it impossible to handle time without ambiguities.
- "Small"? It's literally changing the time, one of the most significant variables in our lives.
- Its annoying and easy to forget and ruins atleast 2 days a year. T. The one with 3 hour daylight in winter for whom dst was made for.
- Yeah, thing is it's not small, and it bothers almost everyone. People with kids having to change their kid's schedule twice a year, programmers having to adapt apps that use times, devices without internet connection having to be updated, unconsistent sleep schedule for everyone...

Let's hope they keep the summer time
Edit: I meant all year round. I hate that it gets dark so soon in the winter
- Why? You do realize, the summer time is the offset from the real timezone? And also it does not change the amount of hours we have in a day. It is still 24h :D
  
  I don’t get people like you. Since your instance is feddit you’re probably from Germany where people have particularly strong opinions on arbitrary things. There’s like 45 minutes difference between sunrise / sunset / zenith between eastern and western parts of Germany so this argument kinda makes no sense. There’s also no "real" time zones because time zones are a human invention.
  
  I'm well aware, but I prefer more light in the afternoon than in the early morning.
  Having the middle of the day at 1 PM is nicer year-round
- Why not every country can decide what time they want to keep?
  
  I believe this was the original EU plan. Scrap it, countries decide which timezone they want to stick with.
  
  Extremely impractical internationally?

Move the clock an hour back in summer instead.
- You like going home from work in the dark?
  
  Yes
  
  Dark? It doesn’t get dark in summer at the end of the workday, even if you move the clock backwards.
  What I do like in summer is being outside, which isn’t possible until after sundown because you’ll burn alive if you do. It doesn’t get comfortable outdoors until after the sun sets which in the middle of summer isn’t until 22:00, thanks to DST.
  I’d like to BBQ, eat outdoors, have a few drinks with friends in my garden. All impossible during weekdays because there is not enough time after sunset before I need to go to bed.

This is likely coming from PSL (farmer party, EPP) part of the government because they’ve been consistently interested in this matter over the years. I don’t think they have enough pull to achieve anything EU-wide but I believe Trump wanted to scrap DST in US too so maybe this is the time stars align finally.

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