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points by w3ll_w3ll_w3ll 23 hours ago | 0 comments

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.

[–] mcv 22 hours ago

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.

[–] LluisGerard 22 hours ago

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.

[–] CiaranMcNulty 22 hours ago

It’s also because Spain being on CEST makes little sense, with its longitude

[–] cromka 22 hours ago

I personally think we'd be better off without summer time but with more timezones in EU.

[–] mdlxxv 22 hours ago

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.

[–] mrweasel 21 hours ago

> 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.

[–] atherton94027 21 hours ago

This is a consequence of WW2, Spain and France moved to CET to align themselves with nazi germany. Portugal and the UK didn't.

[–] mrweasel 19 hours ago

I knew about Spain doing it to align with Germany, but I had no idea that France used to be UTC.

[–] atherton94027 5 hours ago

Not to be pedant but that's GMT – UTC doesn't have daylight savings

[–] pjmlp 19 hours ago

Yeah, it is even more weird when going from Portugal to Galicia, as the longitude kind of doesn't change.

Even if it was a political decision, as answered on sibling comment, moving east at least makes some sense for the common person.

[–] wongarsu 22 hours ago

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

[–] bryanlarsen 20 hours ago

That's natural. Without clocks and artificial light humans wake up with the sun and gather around the campfire when the sun goes down.

[–] tedodor 22 hours ago

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.

[–] matwood 22 hours ago

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.

[–] Thlom 21 hours ago

By end of year the sun comes up around 10 here. If we were on permanent summer time it wouldn't come up until 11. But at least the sun wouldn't set until 16:00 instead of 15:00 as it does now in December. :D

[–] Yizahi 19 hours ago

It is not weird when the standard is either outdated or meaningless. Why exactly a sun high point "must" match precisely 12:00 mark? Literally no one needs that precise match for any valid reason (if it were the case then DST would be impossible, and it is obviously just fine).

[–] sdevonoes 20 hours ago

Yeah but the sun would set later in the evening. That’s a nice tradeoff

[–] fossilwater 21 hours ago

Every summer, DST destroys my sleep. I find it hard to get into "sleep mode" when there is still some sunlight at 22:30

[–] watwut 20 hours ago

> In winter the sun wouldn't come up until 9:30.

I dont care when it goes up. What sux is that it goes down too soon. I would gladly take a shift where it goes up later if I get to have more sun afternoon.

[–] karlosvomacka 22 hours ago

> In winter the sun wouldn't come up until 9:30.

Much better than having sunset before 16:00.

[–] nkmnz 22 hours ago

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/

[–] watwut 18 hours ago

There is no morning light exposure either way. Seriously. You are talking about "scientific evidence" from completely different time zone with completely different light conditions and completely different lifestyles. There are multiple hours of dark between sunset and going to sleep in the winter anyway. You are waking up into dark and going to school/work anyway.

And only very few people are like leisure or outside sport activities in the morning before going to school or work. It is just not that relaxing when you have to watch the clock or take longer shower after.

[–] nkmnz 13 hours ago

> You are waking up into dark and going to school/work anyway.

You're spot on. Now change the problem, not the symptom.

[–] nkmnz 22 hours ago

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.

[–] myersj 18 hours ago

How, specifically, would you solve for "just show up like, whenever you want" for kids in school?

[–] simonra 13 hours ago

School is where we show people that society will sacrifice them for others without consideration. So it would be on brand and efficient to let it be up to the parents convenience. And now that it's said that large swathes of employment will be displaced by language models, surely there will be enough manpower going around to have two or three shifts of teachers?

[–] nkmnz 12 hours ago

Where I live, teachers teach for <20 hours a week (<30*45min), 40 weeks a year. I bet there's some room for a second shift ;)

[–] nkmnz 13 hours ago

Exactly like that. Open office hours from the current start of school (Ts) -2h with supervision, self study, project work. Then regular classes from Ts +2h until the current end of school (Te) -2h, with the same offering of study time until T2 +2h. Total time in school can be reduced by 2h or increased by 2h compared to today, based on grades. Of course it will cost money. But don't get me started on the cost of having many children not fulfilling their academic potential because they are tired due to biological incompatibility with the Prussian ideal of the morning person. And now let's speak about childhood depression... or about the fact that 60% of ADHD diagnoses amongst teens vanish once their sleep is fixed.

[–] flohofwoe 22 hours ago

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.

[–] watwut 18 hours ago

It is not dark late afternoon. It is dark early afternoon

[–] flohofwoe 17 hours ago

How early it gets dark in winter depends on how far up north you are of course. On my latitude (Germany) it gets dark around 4:30pm and 5:30pm in winter, which for me is late afternoon (6:00pm would then be early evening)

[–] stavros 22 hours ago

And it would also set later, which is my personal preference as a Greek.

[–] lgrebe 22 hours ago

I dont see how having multiple timezones in europe would be disadvantageous.

[–] 4thguy 22 hours ago

Exactly. It's not like there aren't multiple timezones in Europe already

[–] _ph_ 22 hours ago

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.

[–] bmacho 17 hours ago

> We do have multiple time zones in Europe.

We mostly have CET and there are minuscule +1 and -1 on both sides.

[–] N19PEDL2 16 hours ago

Wait until all the DCF77 clocks around the continent will start to diverge from the official time of the country in which they are located.

[–] mantas 22 hours ago

At least in my whereabouts it's more about split opinions inside the country.

[–] not-kinsale-joe 22 hours ago

I think there is also an issue with Ireland needing to stay in the same time zone as Northern Ireland.

[–] bloak 21 hours ago

That's right. I think for political reasons Northern Ireland has to have the same time as Ireland and the same time as Britain.

And Scotland has to have GMT in the winter so that school children don't have to walk to school in the dark. (Suffering and deaths were caused when they experimentally tried UTC+1 in the Scottish winter.)

Therefore, if you want to get rid of clock changes it really has to be GMT for the whole of the British Isles. I think that would work for me. But I'd rather stick with the current system than make any other change, like UTC+1 all year or Britain different from Ireland.

[–] ninalanyon 20 hours ago

> Scotland has to have GMT in the winter so that school children don't have to walk to school in the dark.

This gets brought up every time the discussion happens, yet we manage perfectly well even further north here in Norway.

Also why should people need government permission to vary the time at which they do things?

As far as I'm concerned I just want the clock to not change every spring and autumn. Institutions can surely be left to decide for themselves what working hours they have? After all shops, cafes, restaurants, bars, etc., already do that.

[–] Hamuko 20 hours ago

>This gets brought up every time the discussion happens, yet we manage perfectly well even further north here in Norway.

Yeah, try going to school in Lapland. If school starts at 09:00, you're walking to school in the dark. If school ends at 14:00, you're walking home in the dark.

[–] Someone 22 hours ago

> 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.

[–] mantas 22 hours ago

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

[–] _ph_ 22 hours ago

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).

[–] 1718627440 15 hours ago

If solar time does not matter, why do you care about at when number you get up, go to work, come back and get back to sleep? This would be even more ridiculous. People care about the time, because it's a proxy for sun.

[–] DocTomoe 22 hours ago

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

[–] iggldiggl 20 hours ago

> My preferred solution would be to abandon all time zones and use something like UTC

Which means that

a) textual time references in stories would stop working unless also specifying a location, which would cause a lot of weirdness, especially in fiction

b) perhaps more importantly for day-to-day life, it causes a lot of weirdness around the change of the calendar day and the weekday. It's a rather useful property of the current system that the change of calendar day happens at a time when most people are asleep or otherwise not too fussed about the exact calendar date.

If you completely abolish time zones, that means that for everybody not lucky enough to live near wherever the meridian ends up (which would always be a significant fraction of the world's population, no matter where you'd place the meridian), the change of calendar date would happen during the middle of the waking hours, which causes a lot of weirdness (do public holidays now actually start and stop in the middle of the working day?) and makes date references vastly more cumbersome because a single calendar date can now refer to both solar n in the afternoon/evening and solar date n+1 in the morning.

So you'd have to start using rather awkward double dates for referring to a certain solar day ("the event will take place from the 22/23rd to the 24/25th", "see you on Thursday/Friday" [which isn't the same thing as "see you on Thursday or Friday" today, because that'd become "see you on Thursday/Friday or Friday/Saturday" under the new system properly]), or else develop some convention based on the local solar noon/midnight, which is basically reintroducing time zones through the back door.

[–] DocTomoe 15 hours ago

That only is a problem if you don't separate the 'time number' from the observed local time.

You could easily have a 'multiple calendar days during one solarday' situation. In fact, many countries already do this for their TV programming, in which a show might screen on "Thursday at 23:55 until 03:15".

For common things, you could just refer to as 'tomorrow morning'. If you need more precision, you can fall back to .beats. "School starts @740" Incidentally, that's exactly why I liked .beats: no false associations.

[–] OroPla 20 hours ago

Why do we all need to have the same time? And if we do, we should just use UTC around the globe.

[–] mantas 22 hours ago

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.