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 β€οΈ
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 youβve 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 weβre both going to spend six months in Egypt and Finlandβs 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.
I like this.
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 Iβm 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.
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.
Doesn't matter. If the difference of 12:00 to natural noon is small just don't care, if it's large then a 9 to 5 can be an 11 to 7 where's the fucking problem, we can all switch to one zone and be fine.
There's no such thing as "Summer time". What we have during winter is the astronomical time. Otherwise, I don't know whether I have a preference. I guess we could switch them up every other year or so, in order to sunset any confusion in the morning.
I very never heard anyone discussing this in real life outside of maybe 6 days a year. Much less so since smartphones became people's primary clocks since they auto adjust.
People also don't agree on which time should be kept.
6 days a year is quite a bit, but also the frequency at which it comes up in conversation is not really relevant to whether people want/don't want?