The EU DST debacle has been such a shitshow that I have trouble believing the words "perhaps for last time". And now with COVID-19, I haven't seen anyone actually focus on implementing the damn thing.
For once pretty much no one is aware of this supposed change. There was like a couple of articles on the day it was voted and that's it.
This will 100% not happen, it's another one of those things that the EU parliament votes that everyone ignores, and it's perfect ammunition for those complaining that it makes laws without popular consultation.
Trying to go forward with this change will generate massive anti EU backlash.
And then you have the UK problem. Having variable time offsets between EU and UK would add yet another layer of disruption on top of Brexit.
>This online consultation, which ran from 4 July to 16 August 2018, received 4.6 million responses from all 28 Member States, the highest number of responses ever received in any Commission public consultation. According to the preliminary results (see annex), 84% of respondents are in favour of putting an end to the bi-annual clock change.
Selection effect. Those who really cared about this commented.
But what about the 99% rest of population? It's a mistake thinking that because they dont realllly care they will accept either way.
Resistance to change is huge, especially when it plays into the narrative "Bruxelles demanded it"
And what I meant by lack of popular consultation is that if you go on EU streets and ask about this change 95% of people will have no idea what you are talking about.
> Selection effect. Those who really cared about this commented.
And a disproportionate proportion of those (more than two thirds) were from Germany, were that topic was an especially hot issue for some reason or other.
Issues with the NI/IE border are always delicate, due to obvious reasons in the recent past. Let's say Portugal and Spain's quarrels are much much farther in the past!
The EU is currently one timezone for most of its area, the whole continent excluding Portugal (edit: and Finland, Greece, Baltic states) has the same timezone. But actually it should be 3 or 4 timezones if you want to be close to solar time. Also, there are people who would prefer having solar zone time +1 (so e.g. UTC+2 in Germany instead of UTC+1). The EU decided to chicken out and let the members decide for themselves. So now each country has to decide which timezone it would like to implement, and of course if a neighbour does it differently, you also got yourself a timezone boundary at your border, which people dislike. So now all the politicians are caught in a state of indecision, keeping the status quo.
I hope that we can stop trying to sync noon to the local sun at some point. I think it made sense when communicating over distances was hard and rare. In that case giving local time some meaning (ex: "People tend to wake up around 8") had some value. However now that communicating with people around the word is commonplace I think that benefit is outweighed by the value of knowing what time people are talking about. Because if you try to schedule something before I want to wake up it is incredibly obvious to me. However if we mess up the timezone math by and hour no one will notice unless they think to explicitly check.
The only real downside I see is that if the day number changes during your "day" it could be confusing. However I think we will quickly learn to deal with it (overnight shifts have been a thing forever and doctors seem to manage). Plus we already have a weaker form of this when we are talking about late-night activities so I think we will figure it out.
I didn't mean to say the EU should enforce a timezone. The EU didn't get involved at all after the decision to get rid of DST. Not even by providing guidance or suggestions for the new timezone layout. Usually when there is something to be decided, there is a EU summit or work group. But they didn't even do that.
Brazil spent 3 years talking to everybody, publishing the change, and making sure everybody was on the same page. Yet, all the companies providing software got it wrong at least once (some more than 3 times). The only software that got it right were community based FOSS distributions (not raspbmc... that got me).
At least all the institutions got it right, so it was enough to announce "Windows|Red Hat|iOS|Android|whatever is wrong today, ignore it and use some other clock".
It will not happen. The science is overwhelming that having one timezone all year long is worse for people, and switching the clock back and forth twice a years is a minor nuisance at most.
The EU's "Ban DST" is the same populist bullshit as Trumps "inject Windex to cure COVID". Based on nothing and ignorant at best.
And the cherry on top is, if you ask the EU if they want to receive a no strings attached gift of €10.000.000.000.000 or €11.000.000.000.000, it would still take them 20 years to decide. No way they will ever reach consensus on DST.
Seem to have come to a consensus that if we're going to get rid of DST, then health-wise it is best to have Standard Time year-round:
> As an international organization of scientists dedicated to studying circadian and other biological rhythms, the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) engaged experts in the field to write a Position Paper on the consequences of choosing to live on DST or Standard Time (ST). The authors take the position that, based on comparisons of large populations living in DST or ST or on western versus eastern edges of time zones, the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or permanently.
For a longer-read, referencing quite a bit of academic literature, but a conclusionary snippet:
> In summary, the scientific literature strongly argues against the switching between DST and Standard Time and even more so against adopting DST permanently. The latter would exaggerate all the effects described above /beyond/ the simple extension of DST from approximately 8 months/year to 12 months/year (depending on country) since /body clocks/ are generally even later during winter than during the long photoperiods of summer (with DST) (Kantermann et al., 2007; Hadlow et al., 2014, 2018; Hashizaki et al., 2018). Perennial DST increases SJL prevalence even more, as described above.
Other position papers that I've dug up over the years when curiosity got the better of me:
> Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) is dedicated to advancing rigorous, peer-reviewed science and evidence-based policies related to sleep and circadian biology.
(Personally, I'm just going to trust the experts on this as I don't have the energy to go digging in things. A quick cursory Google/DDG search is enough for me.)
> The science is overwhelming that having one timezone all year long is worse for people,
Well the majority of people, countries, and square-kilometres of land doesn't have daylight saving so you'll have to do better than that.
At some latitudes with some social norms (regarding things like school start times) DST is beneficial. In others it's not. There are no absolutes here.