[corty]

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.

[Hamuko]

>The EU is currently one timezone for most of its area, the whole continent excluding Portugal has the same timezone.

That's definitely not accurate.

[throw0101a]

A good portion of the EU is in CET when they probably shouldn't be when it comes to solar time:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Europe

France should probably, AFAICT, be in WET (like the UK) and Spain definitely should be. Solar time offsets are quite off for them:

* http://blog.poormansmath.net/how-much-is-time-wrong-around-t...

* https://github.com/stefano-maggiolo/solar-time-vs-standard-t...

* https://24timezones.com/world-time-zones#toc-0

[kevincox]

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.

[throw0101a]

> I hope that we can stop trying to sync noon to the local sun at some point.

Humans have circadian rhythms that have health effects:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronobiology

See my comment linking to various position papers of the scientists who study in this field:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26088541

They generally want to get rid of DST completely and stick with Standard ("winter") Time all year round. (I don't know enough to gainsay them.)

[kevincox]

I'm not saying that we shouldn't sync our schedules to the sun, I'm saying that we should sync time to the sun.

So in Toronto I can wake up at 12:00 and in London people can wake up at 8:00. It just changes the number on the clock.

[corty]

Oh, you are right, sorry. The Baltic states, Finland and Greece are UTC+2/3

[bilekas]

IE use DST also fyi.

> The EU decided to chicken out and let the members decide for themselves

There are reasons the EU doesn't just enforce timeZones across its members.. So this is a 'strange' comment that bothered me.

[corty]

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.