Most Europeans woke up on Sunday clocks that jumped forward by one hour. The twice-annual time change has long been contentious and was even voted against in an EU open consultation back in 2018.
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.
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.