[highmastdon]

We (Europe) shouldn't fragment time zones that much. We (NL) should stay on permanent summer time.

Reasons

- criminality is lower when there's longer light

- earlier darkness leads to more accidents. It's better to have longer darkness after the masses are RESTED (in the morning), opposed to when they're TIRED (in the evening)

- longer day-time for office workers, is more productive

- shorter time of year that has long after noon darkness. As humans are using artificial light to stay up longer, it's better to align the time of day with that

[pmontra]

I live in Italy and I also want a permanent summer time: for the way we live it's far more valuable to have light in the evening than in the morning. Actually, I'd get double summer time March to October or at least April to September.

I know that we could just change our culture and habits and move everything we use to do one hour back, but that has an inertia that will make it impossible.

[jetzzz]

> We (NL) should stay on permanent summer time.

> Reasons

> ...

Why not just have time as close to solar as possible and move working hours as needed? I have always found arguments for permanent summer time very confusing. Just move working hours as needed, why do you need to deviate the entire clock from the solar time for that?

[this_user]

Because we no longer live in a pre-industrial society where people start work with the sunrise and go to bed at sunset, because the only available artificial light is candles. For the vast majority of people, noon is not the middle of the day.

[recursive]

So what does "noon" even mean? Why is it significant?

[GoblinSlayer]

Maybe fix that? Make solar noon the middle of the day. Then clock can show any number.

[adhesive_wombat]

Because many people for some reason don't strongly value the derivative of the solar inclination being zero and a local maximum within at most slightly over 30 minutes[1] of an analogue watch having the hands both vertical, on the few days a year that the equation of time is zero.

[1] Because the equation of time might not be exactly zero at noon, the Earth isn't a perfect ovoid and you could be up to 7.5 degrees of longitude from the centre of an hour-wide timezone, even if you drew them perfectly straight down the globe with no regards to national borders.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

Because it's easier to adjust the clock than to get employers to adjust schedules and to adjust public transit etc. accordingly.

[GoblinSlayer]

Public transit suffers from coinciding schedules: when all people rush at the same hour same minute, they create rush hour.

[highmastdon]

Interesting perspective. I'd like to use that and say that we should have solar noon in the middle of our "awake" hours instead of in the middle of our work hours. This would benefit even more. We're not in a society where your activities are from dawn to dusk, more so, it's usually from dawn to dusk+evening time.

So, let's take the assumption that the average awake time is 7:00 - 22:00. Gives us 15 hours of awake time.

Solar noon should be at 7:00 + half of the awake time: 7 + 15/2 = 14.5 = 14:30

To calculate sunrise on the longest day and shortest day we use: 14.5 - half of light time

To calculate sunset on the longest day and shortest day we use: 14.5 + half of light time

This means sunrise and sunset in Amsterdam:

summer, longest day, 16:48, 16,8 hours:

- sunrise: 14.5 - 16.8/2 = 6.1 = 6:06

- sunset: 14.5 + 16.8/2 = 22.9 = 22:54

winter, shortest day, 7:41, 7.683 hours:

- sunrise: 14.5 - 7.683/2 = 10.6585 = 10:40

- sunset: 14.5 + 7.683/2 = 18.3415 = 18:20

Given this reasoning, instead of being GMT+1, Amsterdam should be GMT+3 all year round

[ghaff]

It's basically a coordination problem. Workplaces, schools, stores...

[GoblinSlayer]

How do you expect stores to coordinate? If they worked during work hours, what's the point? People work during work hours, they don't go to stores. To solve this stores work around the clock or until 21 hour.

[ghaff]

I don't. That's the whole point. Many/most stores, schools, companies, etc. are open about the same hours year-round. To the degree that people prefer those hours shifted relative to the sun at different times of the year, using DST provides that coordination at the cost of everyone having to change their clocks (or having a computer do it for them) twice a year.

[GuB-42]

> It's better to have longer darkness after the masses are RESTED (in the morning), opposed to when they're TIRED (in the evening)

Speak for yourself! I am definitely sleepier in the morning, and definitely feel less safe driving in the morning.

I prefer summer time, because I almost never wake up before dawn, but for most people, I think DST is actually the best. You generally want people to wake up at around sunrise. It means we could adjust office hours to sunrise, say, work starts 1h30 after sunrise and ends 10h after sunrise. Nice, but it would be a mess. Instead we are using clocks, but the problem becomes that during winter, you will wake up and even sometimes start to work at night, something that most people dislike, and during the summer, morning daylight is lost to sleep. So, how to fix the problem? DST of course. It is an approximation, but it means that as a whole, our lives more closely match the sun cycles.

So that's my opinion, keep the DST. It is added complexity compared to no DST, but we have been doing that for decades, we know how to deal with it. And while many people want to abolish DST, about half want winter time, the other half want summer time, there is no consensus, so we might as well keep DST.

[HPsquared]

Driving early in the morning (when compared to equal-darkness in the evening) has the extra risk factor of frost and ice, which both obscures vision and reduces grip. Those factors definitely contribute to accidents.

[bojangleslover]

Criminals can't distinguish between 8PM and 9PM light because they don't operate on an hourly schedule

[matthewdgreen]

Potential victims sure do.

[globular-toast]

> criminality is lower when there's longer light

I just don't understand how anyone can think changing the clock creates more light. If that were true wouldn't everyone change their clocks, and by more than an hour?

All your arguments are just about people starting and finishing work earlier. It's so annoying that it has to be "change the clocks" instead of just "why don't we just start at 8 and finish at 4?"

[gbil]

Permanent summer time is fine for me too in Greece. The linked proposal of moving Greece to CET is a joke anyhow since even now in December in central Greece you have already twilight at 7am which is fine and more useful than having it at 6am and in the Summer without DST sunrise would be too early for any real use while the weather and culture (don’t forget that) makes more use of the sun light in the evening

[irdc]

> We (NL) should stay on permanent summer time.

I think the easiest way to permanently switch to UTC+1:00 will be to first try UTC+2:00 for a year; few people are going to accept only seeing the first rays of the sun at around 9:50 in winter.

[bongodongobob]

I live in the Midwest and everyone I know would MUCH rather have light until 9pm than darkness at 4pm. Get up for work, it's dark. Finish work and get home. It's been dark for an hour. It's incredibly depressing. Everyone is at work at 9:50am, who cares whether it's light outside or not?

[zozbot234]

Summer time makes plenty of sense as-is, especially at fairly extreme latitudes like the Netherlands. Pithily stated, it is about keeping the wall-clock time (meaning the clock everyone looks at, the Schelling point in a society-wide coördination game) approximately aligned with sunrise/dawn. That way you always have sunlight in the morning, but the sun never rises too early making you lose sunlight in the evening.

> ...opposed to when they're TIRED (in the evening)

Morning darkness is way more dangerous. You don't want to have dark mornings when people are in a rush, commuting to work.

[zirgs]

Morning darkness is unavoidable during winter unless you start working at 10 or so.

[Someone]

Unless you do what the Greeks did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hour#History:

“Instead of dividing the time between one midnight and the next into 24 equal hours, they divided the time from sunrise to sunset into 12 "seasonal hours" (their actual duration depending on season), and the time from sunset to the next sunrise again in 12 "seasonal hours".”

I think that can work reasonably well close to the equator, but in Athens, the ‘hour’ already would vary from about 47 minutes to about 73 minutes. Feels too large for me for such a system to work, but that may be because I’m too accustomed to the current system.

And of course, going further North, the difference becomes very large.

Because of that, I think it wouldn’t work in large parts of the world in a society that has artificial light.

There also ‘may’ be some complications to making that change, though (would hourly wages still work, for example?)

[zozbot234]

> “Instead of dividing the time between one midnight and the next into 24 equal hours, they divided the time from sunrise to sunset into 12 "seasonal hours" (their actual duration depending on season), and the time from sunset to the next sunrise again in 12 "seasonal hours".”

It would be interesting to try this in the modern era. Though to do this really well you should probably vary the duration of the hour smoothly throughout the day (with no overly jarring shift at sunrise or sunset), so the difference would be felt quite extremely around noon and midnight whereas the hours around sunrise and sunset (6AM and 6PM with perhaps half an hour of dawn and twilight respectively in non-polar latitudes) would be close to normal.

[raverbashing]

"permanent summer time" yes, and have you checked how does that look like in winter, right?

It would mean a sunrise at 9h30 (given today's sunset/sunrise times)

[datadrivenangel]

Better than sunset at 4:30pm.

[serpix]

you're lucky, it is 3:30pm in Finland. Dusk at 3pm. Up north it is even worse, although they've got the Borealis and usually snow.

[euroderf]

One element in timezone decisions is that kids should make the trip to school in daylight. But that is futile in Finland. Today's sunrise in Helsinki (very south) is nearly 9 o'clock.

[hypnootis]

Just checked my weather app and yup, sun rises at ~10am and sets ~2pm here in northern Finland

A bit difficult to fulfill that sunlight exposure every morning.

[mrspuratic]

Winter and latitude, not longitude should of course guide the selection. Dublin today, Nov 30th, marks the start of the 6 week period where daylight is less than 8 hours, IMHO only wintertime (UTC) makes sense here. Oddly IST, Irish Standard Time and legal time, is UTC+0100. Sticking with IST all year round means 10:00 sunrise in late December for the north-western most parts of the country (Belmullet, for example).

[tinus_hn]

Luckily most people have finally tired of this endless whinery and realized that summertime really isn’t a big deal and we have bigger fish to fry.

[pharmakom]

Counter argument: we need blue light from the morning sun to wake up properly.

[petre]

Mobile phones, computer screens and LED lighting solved this problem.

[jimscard]

Not actually supported by the science, which shows that the misalignment with our circadian rhythms is the most important consideration. Permanent standard time is the optimal scenario, and the one our bodies and minds are optimized ofor.

[edgyquant]

> criminality is lower when there's longer light

Correlation is not causation

[ImJamal]

What do you believe the causation is then?

If light isn't what impacts it, then it seems like the summer should have more crime than winter. Kids are out of school and there is no snow and cold.