This articles mentions that Cuba tried permanent DST in 2004-06. This makes me wonder, has anyone ever tried permanent DST and not given up? I know Russia attempted in 2011-2013[1] (before switching to permanent standard time), and the US did it in 1974[2] before going back. I know British Columbia did it this year, but I wonder how long that will last. BC is pretty North, and I wonder how local Canadians will feel about the very dark mornings in winter.
I'm very much the kind of person that prefers the sun extending in the afternoon than the downside waking up in the night. The current "normal" makes the days feel more easily as "lost".
If we could just all stick to UTC in the world... DST is just a (North) American and European invention, nobody in the world follow that non sense. And whether DST or Winter time, it doesn't matter, just choose one or the other, it can only be better than the current situation
I hate DST switching, and since last 3 days I've tried to live as if DST didn't happen, go to sleep super early etc.
It completely fails when you account for everyone else around you. Could work if you live alone with flexible working hours. But having a semi-active social life and kids makes it impossible.
> Every single time adjustment (or jet lag) is a drama for me
As a counter-point, I personally don't even notice it. Also, I live in Romania, so every trip West of the border, even just to Hungary, means a one-hour change, so, again, no big deal.
Yeah same here, I don't even noticed the time switch this time. I remember it was worse as teenager, so maybe it affects young people more than old farts ;)
Haha I know a skit from 1990, where the comedian makes this exact point.
He even takes it a step further:
“Why settle for turning back time just one hour? Think about how much we f*cked up the world in the past 30 years! Let’s turn time back 30 years and fix that mess!”
The country is in shambles, beyond bankruptcy, in cases literally starving. Because of it"international" sanctions. Severe shortages of petrol, water and energy.
So it wouldn't be surprising if, by moving the clock every year in just one direction, petrol, water and electricity is saved. And it wouldn't even be suprising if that actually happens.
I'm curious how disruptive this would be from a database perspective ? For eg, All the flight bookings to/from Cuba needs to be updated because it would have originally accounted for DST.
If application engineers did their job correctly, they have nothing to update because you should store future events as a wall clock time + timezone, not an instant (ie something like `2026-09-01T09:00:00, America/Havana`, not `2026-09-01T09:00:00-05.00`).
Which means that flight booking systems are _probably_ fine (they're probably the domain that cares most about timezones and time changes so they've probably modelled it right), but many systems are not fine because it's such a common thing to get wrong.
well https://www.iana.org/time-zones/releases/2026f has the right info. If they stored everything in the DB as UTC... this is like a DNS change. Downstream partners need to have a TTL on it.
In EU it's currently stalled because some countries want to stay permanently on their DST time (south europe) and others (north europe) want to stay on their solar time.
It's better to make a common decison about this, so we are stalled.
It's weird to standardise on summer time instead of standard time. It moves you one timezone to the east. And in western Europe, a lot of countries are already on central European time. Permanent summertime would put them on eastern European time, same as Kyiv. In winter the sun wouldn't come up until 9:30.
In Spain most people I talk to want permanent summertime because they like having sun late at the evening during summer, and they can't stand it when in winter the sun sets at 17:00. I think the issue is that a lot of offices work from 9:00 to 13:00 and 15:00 to 19:00. I remember when working on an office in Barcelona and having to drive 1 hour. I would leave home in darkness and drive back home in darkness.
Spaniard here. I'm one of those few weirdos that desperately need daylight in the mornings to properly function, especially in autumn and winter, and couldn't care less if it gets dark earlier in the evening. I might even welcome it, especially in summer. We are rare, but we exist!
Spain is already in the wrong time zone for standard time, and when DST hits, it's two hours off the time we really should have. It's unnatural for daylight to last until 22:00 or nearby in june and july in Spain's latitude. A bit more and we'd end up with some kind of midnight sun, like we were in the Arctic Circle. It's ridiculous.
I mean, it's usually so hot, and getting hotter every year, that you can only go outside somewhat comfortably after nightfall anyway, so I'd actually prefer if it got dark at 20:00 or earlier in the summer, as it should be. On the other hand, it's horribly demoralizing for me when it's almost 8:30 in the morning in mid-october and it's still so dark. Going back to standard time, like we did a few days ago, gives me a brief respite, but unfortunately dark mornings will soon return in a month or so.
Moving time "east" of our actual timezone is pretty appealing to me because of how evening-heavy standard schedules have gotten. The sun might behave symmetrically around 12:00, but most people don't get up at 4:00 and go to bed at 20:00. Most people's days are shifted 2-4 hours to the evening compared to that symmetric schedule, which makes sunlight in the evening more useful than it is in the morning
I would rather stay on permanent summer time and give up one hour of sun in the morning for one more hour of sunlight in the afternoon, even if it places us "wrong" geographically. The recent change from summer to winter time was brutal moving the sunset from 17:30 to 16:30, meaning it's dark when going home from work.
P.S.: it's not even a question of personal preference. It's a question of scientific evidence. Even if you don't believe that most of these benefits apply to most people, you're free to bring evidence about the benefits of early-evening light exposure...
Evidence-backed benefits of morning light exposure:
Improves alertness, attention, and reaction times, although average effects are small. 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis of 150 studies involving 5,401 participants (daytime light, not exclusively morning): https://doi.org/10.1080/15502724.2025.2493669
Helps treat seasonal depression (SAD). Systematic review and network meta-analysis of 17 randomized trials involving 773 patients: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40629637/
Can improve outcomes in nonseasonal depression when bright-light therapy is added to treatment. 2024 meta-analysis of 11 randomized trials involving 858 patients: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39356500/
Natural daylight exposure helps synchronize the biological clock with the solar day. Experimental research found that exposure to natural light-dark cycles advanced circadian timing compared with modern indoor lighting environments: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23910656/
Depends on your personal preference. It's ridiculous that the politic topic is the question "should most of us suffer in the morning or should most of us suffer in evening", instead of "how could we allow for more flexible individual schedules", especially when it comes to school, opening hours of public services, and store hours.
> and others (north europe) want to stay on their solar time.
Closer to their solar time, for quite a few. As an extreme example, most of Spain lies West of the prime meridian (some parts of it even west of Great Britain, the island), but its time zone is an hour ahead of that of London.
But does solar time matters nowadays? In modern day-to-day life noon is not 12:00. People wake up at 5-6-7. And go to bed at 10-11-12. Even for early risers, middle of the day is well past 12:00. Having DST time makes solar mid-day closer to factual mid-day. I'd even argue to for +2 hours DST :D
Yes, solar time matters as your biological rhythm depends on it. The most important part of it being able to have daylight when you either rise in the morning or at least have the sun get up quickly after that. Another important point is, that there is plenty of experimental evidence that shows that starting schools before the pupils are really awake is not effective.
It is a misconception, that "noon" is the middle point of your awake time. That was never the case. Our day usage most of the time is asymmetric: start the day and especially the work with the sunlight, spend the evening time off after work after sun set.
Using the high point of the sun as the reference for the daytime is a very practical choice, as this is the one easily observable time point which doesn't move much over the course of the year (a few minutes, but that is symmetric).
IT matters when you have an economic zone in which some have 9am being 'basically mid-day', while the others have '9am being 'oh, the sun just went up'.
This traditionally has been solved in two ways:
1. do the split and accept that you will have costs associated with different time zones and sleep/wake cycles in your population (e.g.: USA / Soviet Russia)
2. don't do the split, and have the cost by putting a time/light adjustment burden on the population (e.g.: PRC, European Union)
My preferred solution would be to abandon all time zones and use something like UTC, or yet better: .beat / Biel Mean Time [1], which does not come with a 'oh, 12 means midday' penalty.
We do have multiple time zones in Europe. They have been agreed upon for a practical compromise. It is not clear to me what would be the advantage of calling off that compromise and have a costly rearrangement.
I'm quite north (but not the far north) but I'm strongly for DST. If we went for solar time, we'd loose long bright evenings in the summer but have sun at 3am. Spring/fall evenings would be much darker too. I hate time switching. But I'd rather switch then loose DST summer evenings. Otherwise we'd loose a lot of outdoorsy socialising on weekdays
But some people don't go outdoors after work. And they prefer brighter mornings for couple extra weeks. During the winter the mornings are dark with or without DST.
Well, actually not. What was voted on was the plan to end the DST shift. The reason it stalled on was, that there was no decision about how exactly to end the shift.
In my personal opinion, the only reasonable decision would be to permanently return to the standard time before the introduction of DST. Because otherwise the whole European timezone would have to be redesigned.
It'd never happen of course, but I'm of an opinion that a very simple compromise would be to switch it by half an hour once and stop this "who's gonna decide on which zone" nonsense that's been dragging on for almost a decade.
I don't think this would be a good choice. The current setup of the European time zones works very well, it has been decided upon a long time ago, based on geography, the local connections. All arguments point either to returning to the standard time or keep the clock change twice a year.
Note that DST doesn't change that. It makes the already long days feel longer, not the short ones. Or you could view it as your mornings being brighter in winter perhaps. But yeah, as such it never made much sense to me, though maybe my view is too much mid latitude driven.
Sunset isn't changed by DST. You adjust your schedule. You're free to do so on your own terms, without the government forcing everyone to do the same shift at the same time for the same amount of time.
It only works when you don't have children (kindergartens and schools start at 8) or spouse (who can have a different schedule) or office work (so you don't have to be at the office at 9.)
Time has stopped being an astronomical fact, and is a social contract nowadays. It's possible that you can afford to opt out of that contract, but most people can't.
That's mostly true(*), and we should work on making the opt-out a standard procedure where ever possible.
Instead, the public discourse centers around which minority can force the majority to follow their preferred terms in the social contract. At best, it's a zero sum game - most likely, it's a net loss for everyone if we include all externalities, especially the suppression of discussions about more individuality.
(*) DST is not a social contract, it's entirely made up by the law.
You can take it in any direction you want, but I have pretty low expectations of schools willing to teach my kids from 10 to 16, or mechanics willing to fix my car at 20, or doctors willing to take my blood exam at 22 — all that just because that would be convenient for me.
The modern society started with the Industrial Revolution, when the people understood that there are some very tangible benefits when everyone starts working at the same hour, and started building around that. This building included discarding "local time" (an astronomical fact) in favour of standard time (social contract.)
Exactly, the time on the clock is just a number, can't understand people complaining about this.. If one wants to have its dinner at sunset then so be it, whether the sunset is at 4PM or 9PM. I mean I get it some people don't have a freewill unfortunately but many people can dictate how their day shall look like
I hope the EU will follow soon. Or at least my home country. Since the EU already has different time zones, the stalling because "all should have the same time" doesn't make sense.
I wouldn't mind either. But I do see the point of different countries wanting to be in different time zones. I live in Berlin. My parents are in the Netherlands. We're in the same timezone but there's a good 30-40 minute difference between when we have our sunrise and sunset. Very noticeable when you do a video call around that time. I'll be sitting in the dark and it's still light on their side. The central European timezone spans from Spain in the west to Poland in the East. that's roughly 9 degrees west longitude to 24 east. A normal timezone should be about 15 degrees (360/24), not 33. That's more than two hours difference between when the sun sets/rises from east to west.
So, I can see that how some countries like Spain and Poland might want to make different choices when it comes to losing or keeping the hour permanently as Spain is basically in the wrong timezone. If you want to have noon occur when the sun is highest in the sky, you need to be close to 15 degrees east (roughly the Polish border with Germany).
Much of Spain is technically west of Greenwich (0 degrees longitude). Which means it should be GMT. You could make the same argument about France and the Netherlands being closer to Greenwich than the Polish border with Germany. I'm at 13 degrees east in Berlin, so pretty close.
Countries further north tend to care less about this because most of the year it's either too dark or too light most of the time. I used to live in Sweden and Finland. Daylight saving doesn't do anything useful there. There's not much to save when sunrise is just before noon in the winter and shortly after midnight in the summer. In Helsinki (not in the same timezone), the sun is already rising around 2am in the summer and it's still dark at 10am in the winter.
Does anybody what's the status with solar power there? Seems like the country would have plenty of sun to use. I know that some private people in the island are running almost 24x7 on solar and batteries, but most private people, companies and specially the government are still in blackout.
(Unfortunately, it always gets derailed by highly-polarized discussions about whether to stay on DST forever or get rid of it forever. They'll be showing up here again soon enough.)
It is a reasonable take but it is not the _only_ one - I think it is arguably more reasonable to transition away from DST to ordinary "best TZ granularity approximation to zenith-occurs-at-noon" time once, and then stay (and manage) that time over the millenia to come.
But can we... uh... can we keep that as some kind of tertiary issue to solve later after we successfully stop screwing up the clocks twice every year? We don't really need to build a singular omnibus clock overhaul that will most assuredly never come to fruition, do we? :)
I don't understand the obsession with keeping the perfectly vertical sun at noon given we all work from dark to dark under winter time. What would actually help us experience daylight would NOT be moving the clocks or moving work an hour earlier or a few hours later
This makes sense given all of the power outages largely caused by U.S. sanctions. You would in this scenario want to have more daylight extending into the night time hours.
I belive this whole clock fliopity flip twice a year is a huge contributing factor to people's "unbalance", and worsening mental state... Especially the northern parts....
We humans are creatures of habit... Mess with the circadian rhythm of en entire population and expect no adverse effect.... Mhm checks out.
Most of the world is the voice of reason actually.
This is a very European / North American problem for some reason. There are some exceptions, but in general Asia, Africa and South America don't do this.
If you mean "changing time in summer", Chile has been doing this for a while, and I think other countries in South America do to.
If you mean "changing the rules a few hours / days before they should be applied", Chile (again) did this a few years / decades ago, and it wreaked havoc: all scheduled meetings were off by one or two hours, you could not rely on your calendar, etc.
Plenty of stupidity going around in Chile / South America, rest assured.
I remember reading somewhere that we see an increased incidence of heart related ailments around the clock change, hypothesized due to this change in sleep patterns.
The EU again is all talk and no action on this topic. 84% said in a poll to get rid of it back in 2018, parliament voted to end it by 2021. But here we are at the end of 2026 turning the clocks back again. Next march same thing. Honestly at this point I don't think it will ever happen, they will still be "discussing"it in 2040.
Well most people haven't existed for 60 years. Where I'm from, DST was introduced 110 years ago and people still complain. When will the worsening mental state reach equilibrium? Or is there maybe a chance that the worsening mental state isn't due to DST?
I don't know it this will be the case for Cuba, as it's somewhat differently placed on the map, but Russia tried DST only and had to switch to standard time and then stayed there.
Some people absolutely loves DST for some reason, but it creates stress and mental problems for people, especially in the north. The long mornings are somehow worse than the short evenings. Technically it shouldn't matter what the clock shows, but when society insists on things happening at a certain time, whether or not the sun is out becomes important.
We don't care about the people living in the North, there are more of us living not in North and as we live in a democracy (the EU) the majority vote should cound on this.
But I do live in the North and in the EU... I care a create deal about not being stress and depressed.
It is actually an issue and in some sense I think there is a case to be made for a timezone split between northern Europe and southern Europe. So e.g. putting Scandinavia in UTC +1 and Spain and Italy in UTC +2. Where we draw the line is tricky, because I doubt that nether France or Germany would want two timezones.
> But I do live in the North and in the EU... I care a create deal about not being stress and depressed.
I understood that and I genuinely sympathise with the daylight-related syndromes people up there in the North have to deal with, but you also have to understand that further South we also become depressed if the Sun comes down too early, especially in the summer. So from an utility and democracy point of view the wellbeing of the majority (and the vote of said majority) should take prevalence over the wellbeing of the minority.
Because DST is the wrong time; if you look at the legal implementation of DST, most countries carve out exceptions for fields where lying about the time can obviously lead to death and destruction - navigation being perhaps the main one.
What everyone missed is that DST could itself lead to much greater loss of life than we might have lost had the use of DST been mandated all the way through to e.g. large naval, air or spacecraft.
And as research into DST continues, this seems to have been not merely an abstract possibility was missed, but _the actual outcome_. DST is quite literally killing people by the thousands.
102 comments:
This articles mentions that Cuba tried permanent DST in 2004-06. This makes me wonder, has anyone ever tried permanent DST and not given up? I know Russia attempted in 2011-2013[1] (before switching to permanent standard time), and the US did it in 1974[2] before going back. I know British Columbia did it this year, but I wonder how long that will last. BC is pretty North, and I wonder how local Canadians will feel about the very dark mornings in winter.
[1] https://timeinrussia.com/daylight-saving-russia/ [2] https://www.newsweek.com/the-us-tried-permanent-daylight-sav...
I'm very much the kind of person that prefers the sun extending in the afternoon than the downside waking up in the night. The current "normal" makes the days feel more easily as "lost".
So change when you get up.
Mornings are still dark doesn't really matter
It apparently mattered enough that Russia reverted it's decision to stay on DST.
If we could just all stick to UTC in the world... DST is just a (North) American and European invention, nobody in the world follow that non sense. And whether DST or Winter time, it doesn't matter, just choose one or the other, it can only be better than the current situation
I really hope that Italy will follow... Every single time adjustment (or jet lag) is a drama for me.
Everyone in Europe wants to abolish DST, the problem is the consensus for what comes after. So the discussion is stuck since 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_time_in_Europe
Fwiw last week my and my family kept our clocks in CEST. My son sleeps an hour longer in the morning. But we go to bed before 21. Aiuto!
I hate DST switching, and since last 3 days I've tried to live as if DST didn't happen, go to sleep super early etc.
It completely fails when you account for everyone else around you. Could work if you live alone with flexible working hours. But having a semi-active social life and kids makes it impossible.
> Every single time adjustment (or jet lag) is a drama for me
As a counter-point, I personally don't even notice it. Also, I live in Romania, so every trip West of the border, even just to Hungary, means a one-hour change, so, again, no big deal.
Yeah same here, I don't even noticed the time switch this time. I remember it was worse as teenager, so maybe it affects young people more than old farts ;)
If they still move time back in spring, they will gain 1h per person.
If they keep doing it indefinitely, they're looking at some serious profits and boost to GDP.
Haha I know a skit from 1990, where the comedian makes this exact point.
He even takes it a step further:
“Why settle for turning back time just one hour? Think about how much we f*cked up the world in the past 30 years! Let’s turn time back 30 years and fix that mess!”
This is Cuba we're talking about. Profits only matter if they go to the ruling family and friends.
That's unnecessary political stereotyping.
But what does matter in Cuba, is Savings.
The country is in shambles, beyond bankruptcy, in cases literally starving. Because of it"international" sanctions. Severe shortages of petrol, water and energy.
So it wouldn't be surprising if, by moving the clock every year in just one direction, petrol, water and electricity is saved. And it wouldn't even be suprising if that actually happens.
It's not stereotyping when it can be applied to basically every country in the world, including the US.
I'm curious how disruptive this would be from a database perspective ? For eg, All the flight bookings to/from Cuba needs to be updated because it would have originally accounted for DST.
If application engineers did their job correctly, they have nothing to update because you should store future events as a wall clock time + timezone, not an instant (ie something like `2026-09-01T09:00:00, America/Havana`, not `2026-09-01T09:00:00-05.00`).
Which means that flight booking systems are _probably_ fine (they're probably the domain that cares most about timezones and time changes so they've probably modelled it right), but many systems are not fine because it's such a common thing to get wrong.
well https://www.iana.org/time-zones/releases/2026f has the right info. If they stored everything in the DB as UTC... this is like a DNS change. Downstream partners need to have a TTL on it.
From what I've gathered, this is the plan for all EU countries as well. But the pandemic has stalled the overall process.
https://jp.ibtimes.com/eu-clock-change-plan-stalled-104949
In EU it's currently stalled because some countries want to stay permanently on their DST time (south europe) and others (north europe) want to stay on their solar time.
It's better to make a common decison about this, so we are stalled.
It's weird to standardise on summer time instead of standard time. It moves you one timezone to the east. And in western Europe, a lot of countries are already on central European time. Permanent summertime would put them on eastern European time, same as Kyiv. In winter the sun wouldn't come up until 9:30.
In Spain most people I talk to want permanent summertime because they like having sun late at the evening during summer, and they can't stand it when in winter the sun sets at 17:00. I think the issue is that a lot of offices work from 9:00 to 13:00 and 15:00 to 19:00. I remember when working on an office in Barcelona and having to drive 1 hour. I would leave home in darkness and drive back home in darkness.
Spaniard here. I'm one of those few weirdos that desperately need daylight in the mornings to properly function, especially in autumn and winter, and couldn't care less if it gets dark earlier in the evening. I might even welcome it, especially in summer. We are rare, but we exist!
Spain is already in the wrong time zone for standard time, and when DST hits, it's two hours off the time we really should have. It's unnatural for daylight to last until 22:00 or nearby in june and july in Spain's latitude. A bit more and we'd end up with some kind of midnight sun, like we were in the Arctic Circle. It's ridiculous.
I mean, it's usually so hot, and getting hotter every year, that you can only go outside somewhat comfortably after nightfall anyway, so I'd actually prefer if it got dark at 20:00 or earlier in the summer, as it should be. On the other hand, it's horribly demoralizing for me when it's almost 8:30 in the morning in mid-october and it's still so dark. Going back to standard time, like we did a few days ago, gives me a brief respite, but unfortunately dark mornings will soon return in a month or so.
> Spain is already in the wrong time zone for standard time
That's probably even more of an issue for Spain, made even stranger by the fact that Portugal is in the "correct" timezone.
It’s also because Spain being on CEST makes little sense, with its longitude
I personally think we'd be better off without summer time but with more timezones in EU.
Every summer, DST destroys my sleep. I find it hard to get into "sleep mode" when there is still some sunlight at 22:30
Moving time "east" of our actual timezone is pretty appealing to me because of how evening-heavy standard schedules have gotten. The sun might behave symmetrically around 12:00, but most people don't get up at 4:00 and go to bed at 20:00. Most people's days are shifted 2-4 hours to the evening compared to that symmetric schedule, which makes sunlight in the evening more useful than it is in the morning
I would rather stay on permanent summer time and give up one hour of sun in the morning for one more hour of sunlight in the afternoon, even if it places us "wrong" geographically. The recent change from summer to winter time was brutal moving the sunset from 17:30 to 16:30, meaning it's dark when going home from work.
Maybe I’m an outlier, but I’d rather it stay light later. Sunset at 16:30 in the winter is horrible and depressing IMO.
And it would also set later, which is my personal preference as a Greek.
> In winter the sun wouldn't come up until 9:30.
Much better than having sunset before 16:00.
P.S.: it's not even a question of personal preference. It's a question of scientific evidence. Even if you don't believe that most of these benefits apply to most people, you're free to bring evidence about the benefits of early-evening light exposure...
Evidence-backed benefits of morning light exposure:
Advances the circadian clock, helping shift the body's biological night earlier. Randomized controlled study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24179293/
Promotes earlier sleep timing and may improve subjective sleep quality. Systematic review of 45 studies: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30670164/
Improves alertness, attention, and reaction times, although average effects are small. 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis of 150 studies involving 5,401 participants (daytime light, not exclusively morning): https://doi.org/10.1080/15502724.2025.2493669
Helps treat seasonal depression (SAD). Systematic review and network meta-analysis of 17 randomized trials involving 773 patients: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40629637/
Can improve outcomes in nonseasonal depression when bright-light therapy is added to treatment. 2024 meta-analysis of 11 randomized trials involving 858 patients: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39356500/
Natural daylight exposure helps synchronize the biological clock with the solar day. Experimental research found that exposure to natural light-dark cycles advanced circadian timing compared with modern indoor lighting environments: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23910656/
Depends on your personal preference. It's ridiculous that the politic topic is the question "should most of us suffer in the morning or should most of us suffer in evening", instead of "how could we allow for more flexible individual schedules", especially when it comes to school, opening hours of public services, and store hours.
What? No! I find it utterly depressing to get up in the morning and it's still completely dark outside. A dark late afternoon is much nicer IMHO.
> and others (north europe) want to stay on their solar time.
Closer to their solar time, for quite a few. As an extreme example, most of Spain lies West of the prime meridian (some parts of it even west of Great Britain, the island), but its time zone is an hour ahead of that of London.
But does solar time matters nowadays? In modern day-to-day life noon is not 12:00. People wake up at 5-6-7. And go to bed at 10-11-12. Even for early risers, middle of the day is well past 12:00. Having DST time makes solar mid-day closer to factual mid-day. I'd even argue to for +2 hours DST :D
Yes, solar time matters as your biological rhythm depends on it. The most important part of it being able to have daylight when you either rise in the morning or at least have the sun get up quickly after that. Another important point is, that there is plenty of experimental evidence that shows that starting schools before the pupils are really awake is not effective.
It is a misconception, that "noon" is the middle point of your awake time. That was never the case. Our day usage most of the time is asymmetric: start the day and especially the work with the sunlight, spend the evening time off after work after sun set.
Using the high point of the sun as the reference for the daytime is a very practical choice, as this is the one easily observable time point which doesn't move much over the course of the year (a few minutes, but that is symmetric).
IT matters when you have an economic zone in which some have 9am being 'basically mid-day', while the others have '9am being 'oh, the sun just went up'.
This traditionally has been solved in two ways:
1. do the split and accept that you will have costs associated with different time zones and sleep/wake cycles in your population (e.g.: USA / Soviet Russia)
2. don't do the split, and have the cost by putting a time/light adjustment burden on the population (e.g.: PRC, European Union)
My preferred solution would be to abandon all time zones and use something like UTC, or yet better: .beat / Biel Mean Time [1], which does not come with a 'oh, 12 means midday' penalty.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
I think there is also an issue with Ireland needing to stay in the same time zone as Northern Ireland.
I dont see how having multiple timezones in europe would be disadvantageous.
Exactly. It's not like there aren't multiple timezones in Europe already
We do have multiple time zones in Europe. They have been agreed upon for a practical compromise. It is not clear to me what would be the advantage of calling off that compromise and have a costly rearrangement.
At least in my whereabouts it's more about split opinions inside the country.
It's more complex than north vs south.
I'm quite north (but not the far north) but I'm strongly for DST. If we went for solar time, we'd loose long bright evenings in the summer but have sun at 3am. Spring/fall evenings would be much darker too. I hate time switching. But I'd rather switch then loose DST summer evenings. Otherwise we'd loose a lot of outdoorsy socialising on weekdays
But some people don't go outdoors after work. And they prefer brighter mornings for couple extra weeks. During the winter the mornings are dark with or without DST.
Well, actually not. What was voted on was the plan to end the DST shift. The reason it stalled on was, that there was no decision about how exactly to end the shift.
In my personal opinion, the only reasonable decision would be to permanently return to the standard time before the introduction of DST. Because otherwise the whole European timezone would have to be redesigned.
It'd never happen of course, but I'm of an opinion that a very simple compromise would be to switch it by half an hour once and stop this "who's gonna decide on which zone" nonsense that's been dragging on for almost a decade.
I don't think this would be a good choice. The current setup of the European time zones works very well, it has been decided upon a long time ago, based on geography, the local connections. All arguments point either to returning to the standard time or keep the clock change twice a year.
I thought that DST was dumb until I moved to Tokyo and find it sad that sunset is at 4pm in the winter
Note that DST doesn't change that. It makes the already long days feel longer, not the short ones. Or you could view it as your mornings being brighter in winter perhaps. But yeah, as such it never made much sense to me, though maybe my view is too much mid latitude driven.
Sunset isn't changed by DST. You adjust your schedule. You're free to do so on your own terms, without the government forcing everyone to do the same shift at the same time for the same amount of time.
It only works when you don't have children (kindergartens and schools start at 8) or spouse (who can have a different schedule) or office work (so you don't have to be at the office at 9.)
Time has stopped being an astronomical fact, and is a social contract nowadays. It's possible that you can afford to opt out of that contract, but most people can't.
That's mostly true(*), and we should work on making the opt-out a standard procedure where ever possible.
Instead, the public discourse centers around which minority can force the majority to follow their preferred terms in the social contract. At best, it's a zero sum game - most likely, it's a net loss for everyone if we include all externalities, especially the suppression of discussions about more individuality.
(*) DST is not a social contract, it's entirely made up by the law.
You can take it in any direction you want, but I have pretty low expectations of schools willing to teach my kids from 10 to 16, or mechanics willing to fix my car at 20, or doctors willing to take my blood exam at 22 — all that just because that would be convenient for me.
The modern society started with the Industrial Revolution, when the people understood that there are some very tangible benefits when everyone starts working at the same hour, and started building around that. This building included discarding "local time" (an astronomical fact) in favour of standard time (social contract.)
Exactly, the time on the clock is just a number, can't understand people complaining about this.. If one wants to have its dinner at sunset then so be it, whether the sunset is at 4PM or 9PM. I mean I get it some people don't have a freewill unfortunately but many people can dictate how their day shall look like
I hope the EU will follow soon. Or at least my home country. Since the EU already has different time zones, the stalling because "all should have the same time" doesn't make sense.
I wouldn't mind either. But I do see the point of different countries wanting to be in different time zones. I live in Berlin. My parents are in the Netherlands. We're in the same timezone but there's a good 30-40 minute difference between when we have our sunrise and sunset. Very noticeable when you do a video call around that time. I'll be sitting in the dark and it's still light on their side. The central European timezone spans from Spain in the west to Poland in the East. that's roughly 9 degrees west longitude to 24 east. A normal timezone should be about 15 degrees (360/24), not 33. That's more than two hours difference between when the sun sets/rises from east to west.
So, I can see that how some countries like Spain and Poland might want to make different choices when it comes to losing or keeping the hour permanently as Spain is basically in the wrong timezone. If you want to have noon occur when the sun is highest in the sky, you need to be close to 15 degrees east (roughly the Polish border with Germany).
Much of Spain is technically west of Greenwich (0 degrees longitude). Which means it should be GMT. You could make the same argument about France and the Netherlands being closer to Greenwich than the Polish border with Germany. I'm at 13 degrees east in Berlin, so pretty close.
Countries further north tend to care less about this because most of the year it's either too dark or too light most of the time. I used to live in Sweden and Finland. Daylight saving doesn't do anything useful there. There's not much to save when sunrise is just before noon in the winter and shortly after midnight in the summer. In Helsinki (not in the same timezone), the sun is already rising around 2am in the summer and it's still dark at 10am in the winter.
Here in Ireland we already changed the clock on 25/10
God, I would love if the EU actually got going with it.
Does anybody what's the status with solar power there? Seems like the country would have plenty of sun to use. I know that some private people in the island are running almost 24x7 on solar and batteries, but most private people, companies and specially the government are still in blackout.
Nice! I don't really care if we end up on daylight savings or not, just stop this time change madness finally please!
If you read the article it's the worst of both worlds: Keep clock time the same but start work and school 30 minutes later?
Shouldn't we just get up when the sun comes up? And if you can't see the sun, everyone can stay home.
This is the only reasonable and measured take.
(Unfortunately, it always gets derailed by highly-polarized discussions about whether to stay on DST forever or get rid of it forever. They'll be showing up here again soon enough.)
It is a reasonable take but it is not the _only_ one - I think it is arguably more reasonable to transition away from DST to ordinary "best TZ granularity approximation to zenith-occurs-at-noon" time once, and then stay (and manage) that time over the millenia to come.
I like this idea. I like it quite a lot.
But can we... uh... can we keep that as some kind of tertiary issue to solve later after we successfully stop screwing up the clocks twice every year? We don't really need to build a singular omnibus clock overhaul that will most assuredly never come to fruition, do we? :)
Swatch Beat time.
40 odd lines just for handling Cuba alone, amazing
The diff is 23 lines long, the vast majority of which is documentation: https://github.com/eggert/tz/commit/5b5b39dae16f787740b8c0d4...
If you expand the file, there are 43 cases for Cuba over the history covered. Each case is denoted by a line in the yaml file, e.g.
Rule Cuba 1969 1977 - Apr lastSun 0:00 1:00 D
Rule Cuba 1969 1971 - Oct lastSun 0:00 0 S
Rule Cuba 1972 1974 - Oct 8 0:00 0 S
Rule Cuba 1975 1977 - Oct lastSun 0:00 0 S
Rule Cuba 1978 only - May 7 0:00 1:00 D
I have totally solved all issues. I have additional pointer on my watchface for the true position of the sun. https://photos.app.goo.gl/M95bW4XWR2NDUup46
I don't understand the obsession with keeping the perfectly vertical sun at noon given we all work from dark to dark under winter time. What would actually help us experience daylight would NOT be moving the clocks or moving work an hour earlier or a few hours later
This makes sense given all of the power outages largely caused by U.S. sanctions. You would in this scenario want to have more daylight extending into the night time hours.
manually rolled datetime library screams
They're all over it before we hear about it:
3 days ago: https://github.com/eggert/tz/commit/5b5b39dae16f787740b8c0d4...
It's not even the latest change to the library!
So... Cuba is the voice of reason?
Yehh Europe is loosing its mind..
I belive this whole clock fliopity flip twice a year is a huge contributing factor to people's "unbalance", and worsening mental state... Especially the northern parts....
We humans are creatures of habit... Mess with the circadian rhythm of en entire population and expect no adverse effect.... Mhm checks out.
Calling canceling a time change mere days before it was going to happen "the voice of reason" is rich
"Days" is plenty of time, IIRC some tz changes happened hours before they had to come into effect!
Most of the world is the voice of reason actually.
This is a very European / North American problem for some reason. There are some exceptions, but in general Asia, Africa and South America don't do this.
If you mean "changing time in summer", Chile has been doing this for a while, and I think other countries in South America do to.
If you mean "changing the rules a few hours / days before they should be applied", Chile (again) did this a few years / decades ago, and it wreaked havoc: all scheduled meetings were off by one or two hours, you could not rely on your calendar, etc.
Plenty of stupidity going around in Chile / South America, rest assured.
I remember reading somewhere that we see an increased incidence of heart related ailments around the clock change, hypothesized due to this change in sleep patterns.
Switzerland never wanted it: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/society/daylight-saving-time-wh...
> a huge contributing factor to people's "unbalance", and worsening mental state.
This is surely an exaggeration.
https://clin.au.dk/display/artikel/the-transition-from-dayli...
The EU again is all talk and no action on this topic. 84% said in a poll to get rid of it back in 2018, parliament voted to end it by 2021. But here we are at the end of 2026 turning the clocks back again. Next march same thing. Honestly at this point I don't think it will ever happen, they will still be "discussing"it in 2040.
Actually “only” Germany voted back then. Like 3.79% of Germans voted. So that comes out to ~3.18M of 4.6M votes cast by Germans.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_18_...
That’s the downside of EU decision making.
> and worsening mental state
How would something that has been in effect for at least 60 years still lead to a worsening mental state over time?
Yeah, because humans existed for only 60 years.
Well most people haven't existed for 60 years. Where I'm from, DST was introduced 110 years ago and people still complain. When will the worsening mental state reach equilibrium? Or is there maybe a chance that the worsening mental state isn't due to DST?
Daylight saving time: an American Academy of Sleep Medicine position statement
https://aasm.org/advocacy/position-statements/daylight-savin...
The transition from daylight saving time to standard time leads to depressions https://clin.au.dk/display/artikel/the-transition-from-dayli...
WTF. They should abolish DST.
Why?
I don't know it this will be the case for Cuba, as it's somewhat differently placed on the map, but Russia tried DST only and had to switch to standard time and then stayed there.
Some people absolutely loves DST for some reason, but it creates stress and mental problems for people, especially in the north. The long mornings are somehow worse than the short evenings. Technically it shouldn't matter what the clock shows, but when society insists on things happening at a certain time, whether or not the sun is out becomes important.
For the Russian case see: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-28423647
> especially in the north
We don't care about the people living in the North, there are more of us living not in North and as we live in a democracy (the EU) the majority vote should cound on this.
But I do live in the North and in the EU... I care a create deal about not being stress and depressed.
It is actually an issue and in some sense I think there is a case to be made for a timezone split between northern Europe and southern Europe. So e.g. putting Scandinavia in UTC +1 and Spain and Italy in UTC +2. Where we draw the line is tricky, because I doubt that nether France or Germany would want two timezones.
> But I do live in the North and in the EU... I care a create deal about not being stress and depressed.
I understood that and I genuinely sympathise with the daylight-related syndromes people up there in the North have to deal with, but you also have to understand that further South we also become depressed if the Sun comes down too early, especially in the summer. So from an utility and democracy point of view the wellbeing of the majority (and the vote of said majority) should take prevalence over the wellbeing of the minority.
Because it's generally senseless, and particularly for them even more so given their location.
Because DST is the wrong time; if you look at the legal implementation of DST, most countries carve out exceptions for fields where lying about the time can obviously lead to death and destruction - navigation being perhaps the main one.
What everyone missed is that DST could itself lead to much greater loss of life than we might have lost had the use of DST been mandated all the way through to e.g. large naval, air or spacecraft.
And as research into DST continues, this seems to have been not merely an abstract possibility was missed, but _the actual outcome_. DST is quite literally killing people by the thousands.
Good for them. Hope that shames the rest of the world (looking at you EU) to action too.