Summary
Most European countries moved clocks forward one hour on Sunday, marking the start of daylight saving time (DST), a practice increasingly criticized.
Originally introduced during World War I to conserve energy, DST returned during the 1970s oil crisis and now shifts Central European Time to Central European Summer Time.
Despite a 2018 EU consultation where 84% of nearly 4 million respondents supported abolishing DST, implementation stalled due to member state disagreement.
Poland, currently holding the EU presidency, plans informal consultations to revisit the issue amid broader geopolitical priorities.
They need to seriously quit this bullshit. It serves no practical purpose in our modern society, while also having tangible negative effects. So why keep doing it?
I enthusiastically support getting rid of this nonsense.
More daylight in summer rocks. It would be equally rocking in Winter. The clocks shoud stay forward.
But wouldn’t it be neat if midnight was att 00:00 and mid day was 12:00?
Also, you don’t get more daylight by moving the clock. You get more clock.
Time of day is a human invention. We can assign the date lines wherever we like.
Like Japan was nuts. Dark at 3pm in winter. Light at 3am in summer. They’d benefit by shifting that shit two hours forward for sure.
I disagree. The angle of the sun is not a human invention. Trying to invent something from scratch based on that, I would definitely mark one time as “the darkest” and another “the lightest”.
I agree that hours, and therefore date lines and time zones are completely arbitrary though.
If we didn’t have hours we’d still need a way to group times by geographic or political regions; my example above still needs to handle the “lightest where?” question.
I think my conclusion is that organizing people and societies is arbitrary by nature.
It would be neater though to try to make midnight and mid day the basis for which we measure time. Stepping off of that makes it even more arbitrary.
We’re not disagreeing then. I’m just saying some date lines aren’t in the right place in general, but what really matters most? What are our priorities? I don’t think most light and most dark is better, even if it were possible to get every time zone just right.
I feel like having a life, and kids being able to play for longer after school without it being dark throughout the summer is pretty awesome.
It’s that or have school and work finish earlier. I’m all for that, lol.
I fucking hate it
I will never understand why people want the time we only use for 3 months to be the time we use for the whole year. I would rather people just be able to admit that December is dark (for the northern hemisphere) and we can do shit at a different time.
I literally couldn’t care less which time we pick, I just want the madness to STOP
wdym 3 months? both CET and CEST are used approximately half a year
In North America DST is used from second Sunday of March until first Sunday of November.
This means there are 239 days in DST, and 126 days out of DST in 2025. Close to 2 to 1 ratio.
I know it’s different with CEST and CET, and it sucks even more donkeyballs there, when the sun sets around 4PM (instead of 5) regardless.
DST should really be the standard in most places. You want more sunlight in the afternoon, not in the morning.
I prefer more sunlight in the morning. It’s better for your circadian rhythm and it is easier to wake up when it’s bright outside.
I have a taxi company. On one night, one of my drivers did two jobs, one dispatched at 00:15, the other at 00:45, and he clocked off at 02:15. How long was he working for?
A) 1 hour
B) 2 hours
C) 3 hours
D) 2 hours 30 minutes
E) any of the above
A, B or C.
D would mean that you are in a country with a half hour DST offset, in which case we would miss the option 1 hour and 30 minutes.
D can also happen if the 00:45 job was before the 00:15 job, which thanks to the magic of daylight savings, is also possible
Wow, I didn’t even think of that option. Savage.
Edit: I’m gonna steal this to annoy my coworkers.
Wasn’t DST invented in America? How did it even get adopted by the EU?
I’m also seeing that it was formerly used in Russia, India, South America, and some parts of Africa, and it is still used in 4/5ths of Canada and 1/3 of Australia.
New Zealand entomologist George Hudson first proposed modern DST.
Easy to google, bud. Also, the concept is ancient.
That guy was in 1895, which is a hundred years after Ben Franklin suggested it, but neither of them were responsible because it wasn’t adopted until the early 20th century in Canada, Germany, Austria, and the USA roughly in that order.
Well thanks. TIL.
Having said that, “mentioning” is not inventing.
It would be cool if we had fat burning pizza. There you have it. I mentioned it first, so I invented it.
Not your fault that the Internet is full of casual misinformation. None of us are immune from that.
The simple fact is that on the Monday after DST starts, more people have heart attacks and strokes.
Meaning that not going away from it means people will continue to die from it.
I wasn’t sure if you were joking, but nope: https://newsroom.heart.org/news/heres-your-wake-up-call-daylight-saving-time-may-impact-your-heart-health
