>I therefore venture to propose that at 2 a.m. on each of four Sunday mornings in April, standard time shall advance 20 minutes; and on each of four Sundays in September, shall recede 20 minutes, ...<p>This sounds a bit closer to the ideal of just working with respect to sun rise. It eliminates the abrupt transition twice a year and allows the adjustment to be greater or less than an hour which is good because the useful adjustment changes with latitude.<p>These days we could just skip the discrete changes all together and just use solar time directly.
For me practically, I hate this time change. It is already getting dark a little after 5PM. Now it is definitely dark by 5PM. I work in a fairly windowless office. Not seeing the sun is depressing. I like having a few hours of sun after work, psychologically.
I love checking out daylight charts for weird places like Iceland or Svalbard. <a href="https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/norway/longyearbyen" rel="nofollow">https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/norway/longyearbyen</a><p>I didn't know the original proposal was to do it in multiple small shifts, nor that it included an energy savings argument.<p>Most of my life I thought I didn't like daylight saving time. Then recently I looked at the daylight chart (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#/media/File:Greenwich_GB_DaylightChart.png" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#/media/Fi...</a>) and really imagined what it would be like without daylight saving time, and I changed my mind.<p>If I stayed on summer time all year, then in the winter sunrise would be around 9am, and I'd have to commute in the dark. If I stayed on winter time, then in the summer the sun would be up at 5am and down at 8pm. On a normal work schedule, I'd miss the morning time and wish for more sun in the evening.
After moving to a sunny place in the country I noticed how it affected my mood, so I think that every scheme to add natural light to our day is great for mental health. That's why stripping DST in Europe is in my opinion unfortunate.
> This is the whole cost of the scheme. We lose nothing, and gain substantially.<p>Well not in todays connected world.<p>> For Continental trains only will special time tables be required, one for April, a second for May, June, July and August, and a third for September<p>Yep, more like it.<p>I think DST today is less relevant. Light is cheap. I dont actually need candles. Cities and towns also have lights. Today most power is being used by manufacuring, be it at day or at night. I dont think savings is relevant here.<p>Dont get me wrong - I love daylight. But I enjoy that we @ europe will get rid of DST. I just hope we get to stay in summer time :)
Shifting the clocks is an idea that adds a lot of cost and questionable benefits. We have the daylight hours that our location's geography provides. Why not simply set the time zone boundaries such that the location is closest to having the daylight centered around noon and leave the clocks alone. Having changing time zones causes costs in updating all the software.
Am I the only one that thinks staying in summer time is insane?<p>The clock face is not arbitrary. Midday is the middle of the day. Midnight is the middle of the night. (To the nearest hour.) If we abandon these conventions, anything left is entirely arbitrary, and having time zones at all seems like a huge complication vs a single global time zone.<p>We can all get more light in the “evening” by shifting the conventional hours for work and life backwards a bit.
Abandoning timekeeping conventions instead just so that we can start work at some arbitrary number on the clock seems crazy.