Time is a mess.

There is not a whole number of days (Earth’s rotations around its axis) in one year (Earth’s rotation around the Sun). The number of seconds (SI’s seconds, which are some fixed number of oscillations in Cesium atom or whatever) it takes the Earth to rotate 360° around its axis is also not whole and not even constant. Then you have time dilation due to gravity (thanks, Einstein), which means that times flows differently in different places (at least it’s more or less the same everywhere on the Earth’s surface, but then you have GPS, astronomy, and super-precise atomic clocks, where it’s noticeable). And if that was not enough, people live on opposite sides of this ball of a planet (we do agree it’s a ball, right?), but pretty much everyone wants the 7PM to be in the evening and 7AM in the morning, so we also have timezones to account for that.

It’s a mess, but we have more or less figured out how to deal with it. By “deal” I mean that we have systems in place that are not too complicated to be useable or too simplistic to be accurate. So let’s at least not make it more confusing for ourselves, shall we?

Daylight-Saving Time

Even the name itself can be confusing. It should technically refer to the alternative timezone that you use during summer (as opposed to your regular “standard time” in winter), but sometimes it is used to refer to the process of shifting your clock back & forth between these two zones throughout the year.

Hopefully, you’ll be able to tell which one I mean depending on the context.

Anyways, DST!

Pros

• Very flexible: each country is free to choose how exactly they adjust the clock. This includes
  • where¹,
  • when²,
  • by how much³,
  • and how many times a year⁴.
• Causes a spike in lost productivity, accidents & suicides⁵.

Cons

• You get more sunlight in the evening or something along those lines.

Prons

• You save about 0.3% on electricity. Maybe.
  You lose about 0.1% on electricity. Probably.
  We’re not exactly sure.
• It benefits the economy.
  It harms the economy.
  Which one? Yes.

This is so much fun

But it raises a question, why not just shift your workday if you need it, and leave your clocks the fuck alone?

As you could have guessed, I’m a huge proponent of abolishing DST, but even I call bullshit on that “Think of the cows, man” argument against DST.

“And that’s not to mention the unhappy cows and other animals that don’t understand the clocks changing and don’t understand why the milkmaids come to them at a different time.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/mar/25/clocks-go-forward-last-time-russia

Well, maybe shift your milking schedule then to compensate for the shifting of your clock, now would ya?

But admittedly, you can just stop shifting your clock altogether (which is what Russia did back then; and again, 3 years later). The best way to solve a problem is to not create it in the first place, true.

But if you do find yourself in a situation where you want to do something at different times depending on the season, then maybe shift your schedule instead of shifting the entire reference frame.

Way forward

Russia stopped the DST hopping in 2011 and then again in 2014.

Japan stopped it in 1951, China in 1991.

It might be possible to salvage EU (more on that in a bit).

But USA is most likely unsalvageable here, because they are very fond of their democracy and not very fond of sensible standards, so good luck convincing the populous, the lawmakers, the state representatives, the lobbyists, and everyone else who has a say in this to do the sensible thing.

Canada, Chile, Egypt, Israel, New Zeland, and a few others still do DST, but pretty much everyone else has either never done it, or has already stopped doing it, so abolishing this nonsense for good now mostly boils down to EU, as there’s quite a few countries in it.

EU vs DST

By 2015, there appeared some fuzz about potentially stopping the clock hopping.

Then, let me just quote Wikipedia:

On 8 February 2018, the European Parliament voted to ask the European Commission to re-evaluate DST in Europe. After a web survey […], in which 4.6 million European citizens participated, showed high support for not switching clocks twice annually, on 12 September 2018 the European Commission decided to propose that an end be put to seasonal clock changes. In order for this to be valid, the standard […] procedure must be followed, including that the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament must both approve the proposal.

Under the proposal, member countries were expected to decide […] which time they would observe year round.

Then a shitshow began.

Denmark, Netherlands, Finland are anti-hopping and are ready to settle with their “winter” time.

France, Germany, Poland want to stop hopping too and settle with their “summer” time.

But Portugal, Spain and Italy want to continue hopping for some reason. (I suspect the local heat inhibits any sane decision making).

Northern & Southern Ireland want to keep the same schedule (which is understandable), so either both hop or both stay in the same timezone. But while Southern Ireland is in EU, the Northern one is in UK, which was doing Brexit at that time, so yeah… not ideal.

In September 2018, the UK Government said that it “has no plans” to end daylight saving.

Brought to you by the guys who thought Brexit would be a good idea.

Anyways, while things were indeed quite messy, it might have been possible to resolve the matter eventually. But then came 2020 and the priorities have changed, for reasons that need no explanation.

In the end, they just somehow managed to get into a deadlock:

The decision has not been confirmed by the Council of the European Union. The Council has asked the Commission to produce a detailed impact assessment, but the Commission considers that the onus is on the Member States to find a common position in Council. As a result, progress on the issue is effectively blocked.

But a programmer can dream that one day we’ll live in the world without this nonsense.