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Poland pushes for EU to scrap daylight saving time
(notesfrompoland.com)
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this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
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Everyone wants this and it's taking decades....
Sure, but then the question is: Winter time or summer time?
I'm not sure if the European people are equally united in this question.
Summer time. Every time. I'd rather it not be pitch black at 4pm where I am. I'd rather take the extra bit of darkness in the morning.
I also love it being 9pm in June and still having near full daylight ❤️
You know why this sucks? The kids which have to go in the dark to school. I am ok if it's a little bit dark early so the kids are safe.
Then.. why.. not just open the schools later in the day?
You could say the same to the people wanting summer time: just get up earlier
Getting up earlier doesn't give you the opportunity to enjoy all the free-time outdoor activities that are possible in the afternoon after school or work. It's good enough for things like going for a short walk or run by yourself. But it's not good for any organized team activities, activities dependent on other people being at work, activities that need more time - like when you need to drive somewhere, you don't mind to return later when it's dark in the evening, but you don't have enough time in the morning, because you need to get to work or school in time, so it all becomes kind of stressful...
I understand. I guess what really annoys me about this suggestion is that it imposes the preference of one group upon the other.
Yes, everyone has their preferences and it's anoying if you're not in the prefered group. If one group is much larger, I think it's good to consider their needs a bit more though in this particular case. It's also healthy to discuss compromises, which do exist even in this case.
The matter can also be much more complicated than just one prefers this and one prefers the other - I think we're just scratching the surface. I'm not sure about all the sociological, psychological and economic implications.
I prefer the summer time myself, but I'd happily support any winter time iniciative if it seemed like it was getting traction, because I just hate the time changes so much.
For me the sensible thing would be to go back to normal time before the DST nonsense. If people want to adjust their working hours then they can just do that. Builders and farmers already follow they daylight because they must - no reason others can't do the same. It literally does not matter what time the average office drone works.
But whatever is chosen in the end, I just want DST to stop.
Because we don't even get Summer Time or winter time forever. And Germany for example has a party in charge for old people. Or in general we don't have parties at all for Kids which would say. Hey if we get rid of winter Time it's dark for the kids. Let's make school start 1h later. In Germany the States are making the School rules and not Germany itself.
Darkness making going to school unsafe sounds to me like a problem with infrastructure. Many people live in countries where during the winter kids go and leave school in darkness. Why does it make it unsafe?
My country has daylight savings and I still went to school at night, so that point is kinda mute.
Kids in many countries go back home after it gets dark. It's being safe in the morning of being safe in the afternoon and also enjoying some outdoors activities that they couldn't in the dark.
I think we should stop calling it winter and summer time because it's swaying people wrong. Because of course we hate short, dark and cold days and we love long, warm, bright evenings. We love the summer, therefore if we choose summer time it feels like it'll be summer all year long.
But the reality is that (at least where I live) winter time is closer to the sun time and would be preferable in all aspects.
In France, normal time is UTC+1 (CET), and summer time is UTC+2 (CEST), when we actually belong in UTC+0 (and were, before being occupied by Germany). Permanently switching to the so-called "summer time" makes no sense if you’ve ever seen a map of time zones.
And by the way Spain is in the same situation. Spain, which is more western than Greenwich, is going to change time with us this night and we’re both going to spend six months in Egypt and Finland’s normal time zone. That is so wrong.
I often use normal time and offset time to prevent that framing
I think people who prefer summer time do so because it causes the sun to set later. Most people start work in the morning and work inside. They are free to enjoy the sun late in the afternoon, so it means more sun to be enjoyed. The same goes for school children - winter in many countries means going from school after it gets dark, so outdoor activities are limited. Summer time makes it all 1 hour better.
Split the difference. Done.
Yeah, there is no law or rule that UTC offsets need to be full hours.
12 is at suns zenith, done.
If we want to adjust our working hours, we can do that, no need to change the clock itself.
Not only is Zenith at a different time every few kilometers but also during the year, that means you say goodbye to 24h days and to a unified time across multiple countries.
Sure, well just solve this problems how we have already solved it. Something along the lines of a mean or median value.
So it's not "12 is at suns zenith", it's just normal time instead of offset time. Got it.
Yep, people have very strict opinions on this. All sides are like - it's simple, no need for discussions, just do it the way I see it. The possibility of not changing the time twice a year is not enough for most people to be ok with ending up with a time system they don't like. The emotions are too intensive. That's why previous attempts failed and we're stuck with this nonsense.
Split the difference and move forward or backward by 30 minutes only to insure that absolutely no one is ever happy.
I'd be happy. I didn't care which offset is used as long as we stick to it.
Science says winter. If you want to wake up earlier to compensate you can just do that.
I can't just finish work an hour early though. I'm looking forward to summer time because it means an extra hour of daylight after work. I don't want to give that up.
I don't know if many people share my opinion, but I literally don't care one bit. Let's all do UTC across the world, the US needs to be taken down a peg anyway.
Surely UTC is just a newer name for GMT and 0 is Greenwich in England? Since I’m pretty sure the UK came up with the global time zone system in the first place.
There is a slight difference, UTC has leap seconds while GMT stretches seconds to compensate for the uneven spin of the Earth.
And computers will get UTC from an ntp server and, in the presence of leap seconds, stretch seconds to not confuse any programs running on it.
Summer time of course.
Personally I really don't care which, though it would be nice if there was some kind of consistency throughout Europe and not having e.g. France and Germany in one time zone but Netherlands or Belgium in another.
If I was dictator I think it seems reasonable to draw lines west and east of Germany, maybe Poland can be included in Germany's zone too.
A wild idea would be to have the lines cross through countries so they're actually "correct" and the EU is seen as a whole entity rather than just individual countries, but that's probably quite impossible/impractical. Beautiful in a way though, surely a man can dream.
They're not. Not at all. That's why all the previous attempts to abolish time changes failed.
I've never been bothered by the time changing twice a year, why do people want to abolish it so much?
It leads to statistically significant increases in human death, injury, and financial loss due to stress caused by disruptions to circadian rhythm. The question you should be asking is "why do we still do it despite this, when there is literally no benefit?"
The benefit is more sun. Permanent normal time would give us sunrise at 5 am in summer while permanent offset time would give us sunrise at 9 am in winter. By changing the time twice a year we get 6 am and 8 am.
So, completely unnecessary death and injury directly attributable to the time change is worth that?
No, I'm also in favour of abolishing daylight saving time. But it's not true that there are no upsides of the current system.
What's so special about sunrise though? The sunset influences our lives greatly as well. I understand 8am is better than 9am for outdoor workers, because they can start working at the same time as other people.
Yes, I suffer greatly every time. My inner clock is very strong and is not willing to adapt.