[xnorswap]

It's worth noting that technically London uses GMT for 5 months and BST for 7 months.

The GMT offset is zero, but it's important to note the difference especially when configuring servers to avoid nasty daylight savings surprises kicking in at at end of March.

There has been talk of moving to a +1 offset all year round for lighter evenings in winter, albeit at the cost of some very dark morning, but given we couldn't even manage Metrication without people still complaining 20 years later, I can't see it ever happening.

[jmkd]

I think you mean complaining about metrication 50 years later :-)

The counterpoint is that without the metric system how could we make snarky comments on US-based woodworking videos?

[xnorswap]

I was specifically thinking of the "Metric Martyrs" who were jailed over refusing to display weights and measures in metric.

The law requiring metric didn't actually come into force until 2000, these cases were early 2000s. Note that the law to this day still allows for imperial measurements to also be displayed, but they wanted to display in solely imperial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Martyrs

The situation another 20 years later is rosier, even the boomers have spent most their adulthood with metric, and they're dying off now.

[jampekka]

> There has been talk of moving to a +1 offset all year round for lighter evenings in winter, albeit at the cost of some very dark morning

Why not just offset the office and opening etc hours by +1?

[xnorswap]

Because society and culture doesn't work like that.

You can't will a culture of closing up at 4pm during GMT and 5pm during BST. That's just even more confusing.

[jampekka]

The talk was +1 offset in clocks all year around, in effect dropping DST and changing the timezone.

Also a lot of places and services have different hours during different seasons.

[xnorswap]

If you're going through the hassle of dropping DST, why not settle on BST as the permanent timezone if that's what the preference is for hours of daylight?

Asking an entire culture to change from 09:00-17:30 to 08:00-16:30 seems awkward and doomed to failure in comparison to simply landing on BST instead.

[fragmede]

the obvious solution is to move it by .5 the whole year round.