In EU it's currently stalled because some countries want to stay permanently on their DST time (south europe) and others (north europe) want to stay on their solar time.
It's better to make a common decison about this, so we are stalled.
> and others (north europe) want to stay on their solar time.
Closer to their solar time, for quite a few. As an extreme example, most of Spain lies West of the prime meridian (some parts of it even west of Great Britain, the island), but its time zone is an hour ahead of that of London.
But does solar time matters nowadays? In modern day-to-day life noon is not 12:00. People wake up at 5-6-7. And go to bed at 10-11-12. Even for early risers, middle of the day is well past 12:00. Having DST time makes solar mid-day closer to factual mid-day. I'd even argue to for +2 hours DST :D
It's weird to standardise on summer time instead of standard time. It moves you one timezone to the east. And in western Europe, a lot of countries are already on central European time. Permanent summertime would put them on eastern European time, same as Kyiv. In winter the sun wouldn't come up until 9:30.
In Spain most people I talk to want permanent summertime because they like having sun late at the evening during summer, and they can't stand it when in winter the sun sets at 17:00. I think the issue is that a lot of offices work from 9:00 to 13:00 and 15:00 to 19:00. I remember when working on an office in Barcelona and having to drive 1 hour. I would leave home in darkness and drive back home in darkness.
I would rather stay on permanent summer time and give up one hour of sun in the morning for one more hour of sunlight in the afternoon, even if it places us "wrong" geographically. The recent change from summer to winter time was brutal moving the sunset from 17:30 to 16:30, meaning it's dark when going home from work.
Moving time "east" of our actual timezone is pretty appealing to me because of how evening-heavy standard schedules have gotten. The sun might behave symmetrically around 12:00, but most people don't get up at 4:00 and go to bed at 20:00. Most people's days are shifted 2-4 hours to the evening compared to that symmetric schedule, which makes sunlight in the evening more useful than it is in the morning
P.S.: it's not even a question of personal preference. It's a question of scientific evidence. Even if you don't believe that most of these benefits apply to most people, you're free to bring evidence about the benefits of early-evening light exposure...
Evidence-backed benefits of morning light exposure:
Improves alertness, attention, and reaction times, although average effects are small. 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis of 150 studies involving 5,401 participants (daytime light, not exclusively morning): https://doi.org/10.1080/15502724.2025.2493669
Helps treat seasonal depression (SAD). Systematic review and network meta-analysis of 17 randomized trials involving 773 patients: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40629637/
Can improve outcomes in nonseasonal depression when bright-light therapy is added to treatment. 2024 meta-analysis of 11 randomized trials involving 858 patients: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39356500/
Natural daylight exposure helps synchronize the biological clock with the solar day. Experimental research found that exposure to natural light-dark cycles advanced circadian timing compared with modern indoor lighting environments: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23910656/
Depends on your personal preference. It's ridiculous that the politic topic is the question "should most of us suffer in the morning or should most of us suffer in evening", instead of "how could we allow for more flexible individual schedules", especially when it comes to school, opening hours of public services, and store hours.
I'm quite north (but not the far north) but I'm strongly for DST. If we went for solar time, we'd loose long bright evenings in the summer but have sun at 3am. Spring/fall evenings would be much darker too. I hate time switching. But I'd rather switch then loose DST summer evenings. Otherwise we'd loose a lot of outdoorsy socialising on weekdays
But some people don't go outdoors after work. And they prefer brighter mornings for couple extra weeks. During the winter the mornings are dark with or without DST.
This articles mentions that Cuba tried permanent DST in 2004-06. This makes me wonder, has anyone ever tried permanent DST and not given up? I know Russia attempted in 2011-2013[1] (before switching to permanent standard time), and the US did it in 1974[2] before going back. I know British Columbia did it this year, but I wonder how long that will last. BC is pretty North, and I wonder how local Canadians will feel about the very dark mornings in winter.
I hope the EU will follow soon. Or at least my home country. Since the EU already has different time zones, the stalling because "all should have the same time" doesn't make sense.
I hate DST switching, and since last 3 days I've tried to live as if DST didn't happen, go to sleep super early etc.
It completely fails when you account for everyone else around you. Could work if you live alone with flexible working hours. But having a semi-active social life and kids makes it impossible.
> Every single time adjustment (or jet lag) is a drama for me
As a counter-point, I personally don't even notice it. Also, I live in Romania, so every trip West of the border, even just to Hungary, means a one-hour change, so, again, no big deal.
Yeah same here, I don't even noticed the time switch this time. I remember it was worse as teenager, so maybe it affects young people more than old farts ;)
I'm curious how disruptive this would be from a database perspective ? For eg, All the flight bookings to/from Cuba needs to be updated because it would have originally accounted for DST.
well https://www.iana.org/time-zones/releases/2026f has the right info. If they stored everything in the DB as UTC... this is like a DNS change. Downstream partners need to have a TTL on it.
Haha I know a skit from 1990, where the comedian makes this exact point.
He even takes it a step further:
“Why settle for turning back time just one hour? Think about how much we f*cked up the world in the past 30 years! Let’s turn time back 30 years and fix that mess!”
The country is in shambles, beyond bankruptcy, in cases literally starving. Because of it"international" sanctions. Severe shortages of petrol, water and energy.
So it wouldn't be surprising if, by moving the clock every year in just one direction, petrol, water and electricity is saved. And it wouldn't even be suprising if that actually happens.
Sunset isn't changed by DST. You adjust your schedule. You're free to do so on your own terms, without the government forcing everyone to do the same shift at the same time for the same amount of time.
It only works when you don't have children (kindergartens and schools start at 8) or spouse (who can have a different schedule) or office work (so you don't have to be at the office at 9.)
Time has stopped being an astronomical fact, and is a social contract nowadays. It's possible that you can afford to opt out of that contract, but most people can't.
Does anybody what's the status with solar power there? Seems like the country would have plenty of sun to use. I know that some private people in the island are running almost 24x7 on solar and batteries, but most private people, companies and specially the government are still in blackout.
(Unfortunately, it always gets derailed by highly-polarized discussions about whether to stay on DST forever or get rid of it forever. They'll be showing up here again soon enough.)
It is a reasonable take but it is not the _only_ one - I think it is arguably more reasonable to transition away from DST to ordinary "best TZ granularity approximation to zenith-occurs-at-noon" time once, and then stay (and manage) that time over the millenia to come.
But can we... uh... can we keep that as some kind of tertiary issue to solve later after we successfully stop screwing up the clocks twice every year? We don't really need to build a singular omnibus clock overhaul that will most assuredly never come to fruition, do we? :)
This makes sense given all of the power outages largely caused by U.S. sanctions. You would in this scenario want to have more daylight extending into the night time hours.
I don't understand the obsession with keeping the perfectly vertical sun at noon given we all work from dark to dark under winter time. What would actually help us experience daylight would NOT be moving the clocks or moving work an hour earlier or a few hours later
I belive this whole clock fliopity flip twice a year is a huge contributing factor to people's "unbalance", and worsening mental state... Especially the northern parts....
We humans are creatures of habit... Mess with the circadian rhythm of en entire population and expect no adverse effect.... Mhm checks out.
Most of the world is the voice of reason actually.
This is a very European / North American problem for some reason. There are some exceptions, but in general Asia, Africa and South America don't do this.
I remember reading somewhere that we see an increased incidence of heart related ailments around the clock change, hypothesized due to this change in sleep patterns.
The EU again is all talk and no action on this topic. 84% said in a poll to get rid of it back in 2018, parliament voted to end it by 2021. But here we are at the end of 2026 turning the clocks back again. Next march same thing. Honestly at this point I don't think it will ever happen, they will still be "discussing"it in 2040.
Well most people haven't existed for 60 years. Where I'm from, DST was introduced 110 years ago and people still complain. When will the worsening mental state reach equilibrium? Or is there maybe a chance that the worsening mental state isn't due to DST?
I don't know it this will be the case for Cuba, as it's somewhat differently placed on the map, but Russia tried DST only and had to switch to standard time and then stayed there.
Some people absolutely loves DST for some reason, but it creates stress and mental problems for people, especially in the north. The long mornings are somehow worse than the short evenings. Technically it shouldn't matter what the clock shows, but when society insists on things happening at a certain time, whether or not the sun is out becomes important.
We don't care about the people living in the North, there are more of us living not in North and as we live in a democracy (the EU) the majority vote should cound on this.
Because DST is the wrong time; if you look at the legal implementation of DST, most countries carve out exceptions for fields where lying about the time can obviously lead to death and destruction - navigation being perhaps the main one.
What everyone missed is that DST could itself lead to much greater loss of life than we might have lost had the use of DST been mandated all the way through to e.g. large naval, air or spacecraft.
And as research into DST continues, this seems to have been not merely an abstract possibility was missed, but _the actual outcome_. DST is quite literally killing people by the thousands.
From what I've gathered, this is the plan for all EU countries as well. But the pandemic has stalled the overall process.
https://jp.ibtimes.com/eu-clock-change-plan-stalled-104949
In EU it's currently stalled because some countries want to stay permanently on their DST time (south europe) and others (north europe) want to stay on their solar time.
It's better to make a common decison about this, so we are stalled.
> and others (north europe) want to stay on their solar time.
Closer to their solar time, for quite a few. As an extreme example, most of Spain lies West of the prime meridian (some parts of it even west of Great Britain, the island), but its time zone is an hour ahead of that of London.
But does solar time matters nowadays? In modern day-to-day life noon is not 12:00. People wake up at 5-6-7. And go to bed at 10-11-12. Even for early risers, middle of the day is well past 12:00. Having DST time makes solar mid-day closer to factual mid-day. I'd even argue to for +2 hours DST :D
It's weird to standardise on summer time instead of standard time. It moves you one timezone to the east. And in western Europe, a lot of countries are already on central European time. Permanent summertime would put them on eastern European time, same as Kyiv. In winter the sun wouldn't come up until 9:30.
In Spain most people I talk to want permanent summertime because they like having sun late at the evening during summer, and they can't stand it when in winter the sun sets at 17:00. I think the issue is that a lot of offices work from 9:00 to 13:00 and 15:00 to 19:00. I remember when working on an office in Barcelona and having to drive 1 hour. I would leave home in darkness and drive back home in darkness.
It’s also because Spain being on CEST makes little sense, with its longitude
I would rather stay on permanent summer time and give up one hour of sun in the morning for one more hour of sunlight in the afternoon, even if it places us "wrong" geographically. The recent change from summer to winter time was brutal moving the sunset from 17:30 to 16:30, meaning it's dark when going home from work.
Moving time "east" of our actual timezone is pretty appealing to me because of how evening-heavy standard schedules have gotten. The sun might behave symmetrically around 12:00, but most people don't get up at 4:00 and go to bed at 20:00. Most people's days are shifted 2-4 hours to the evening compared to that symmetric schedule, which makes sunlight in the evening more useful than it is in the morning
Maybe I’m an outlier, but I’d rather it stay light later. Sunset at 16:30 in the winter is horrible and depressing IMO.
And it would also set later, which is my personal preference as a Greek.
> In winter the sun wouldn't come up until 9:30.
Much better than having sunset before 16:00.
P.S.: it's not even a question of personal preference. It's a question of scientific evidence. Even if you don't believe that most of these benefits apply to most people, you're free to bring evidence about the benefits of early-evening light exposure...
Evidence-backed benefits of morning light exposure:
Advances the circadian clock, helping shift the body's biological night earlier. Randomized controlled study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24179293/
Promotes earlier sleep timing and may improve subjective sleep quality. Systematic review of 45 studies: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30670164/
Improves alertness, attention, and reaction times, although average effects are small. 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis of 150 studies involving 5,401 participants (daytime light, not exclusively morning): https://doi.org/10.1080/15502724.2025.2493669
Helps treat seasonal depression (SAD). Systematic review and network meta-analysis of 17 randomized trials involving 773 patients: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40629637/
Can improve outcomes in nonseasonal depression when bright-light therapy is added to treatment. 2024 meta-analysis of 11 randomized trials involving 858 patients: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39356500/
Natural daylight exposure helps synchronize the biological clock with the solar day. Experimental research found that exposure to natural light-dark cycles advanced circadian timing compared with modern indoor lighting environments: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23910656/
Depends on your personal preference. It's ridiculous that the politic topic is the question "should most of us suffer in the morning or should most of us suffer in evening", instead of "how could we allow for more flexible individual schedules", especially when it comes to school, opening hours of public services, and store hours.
What? No! I find it utterly depressing to get up in the morning and it's still completely dark outside. A dark late afternoon is much nicer IMHO.
I dont see how having multiple timezones in europe would be disadvantageous.
Exactly. It's not like there aren't multiple timezones in Europe already
At least in my whereabouts it's more about split opinions inside the country.
I think there is also an issue with Ireland needing to stay in the same time zone as Northern Ireland.
It's more complex than north vs south.
I'm quite north (but not the far north) but I'm strongly for DST. If we went for solar time, we'd loose long bright evenings in the summer but have sun at 3am. Spring/fall evenings would be much darker too. I hate time switching. But I'd rather switch then loose DST summer evenings. Otherwise we'd loose a lot of outdoorsy socialising on weekdays
But some people don't go outdoors after work. And they prefer brighter mornings for couple extra weeks. During the winter the mornings are dark with or without DST.
This articles mentions that Cuba tried permanent DST in 2004-06. This makes me wonder, has anyone ever tried permanent DST and not given up? I know Russia attempted in 2011-2013[1] (before switching to permanent standard time), and the US did it in 1974[2] before going back. I know British Columbia did it this year, but I wonder how long that will last. BC is pretty North, and I wonder how local Canadians will feel about the very dark mornings in winter.
[1] https://timeinrussia.com/daylight-saving-russia/ [2] https://www.newsweek.com/the-us-tried-permanent-daylight-sav...
Mornings are still dark doesn't really matter
I hope the EU will follow soon. Or at least my home country. Since the EU already has different time zones, the stalling because "all should have the same time" doesn't make sense.
I really hope that Italy will follow... Every single time adjustment (or jet lag) is a drama for me.
Fwiw last week my and my family kept our clocks in CEST. My son sleeps an hour longer in the morning. But we go to bed before 21. Aiuto!
I hate DST switching, and since last 3 days I've tried to live as if DST didn't happen, go to sleep super early etc.
It completely fails when you account for everyone else around you. Could work if you live alone with flexible working hours. But having a semi-active social life and kids makes it impossible.
> Every single time adjustment (or jet lag) is a drama for me
As a counter-point, I personally don't even notice it. Also, I live in Romania, so every trip West of the border, even just to Hungary, means a one-hour change, so, again, no big deal.
Yeah same here, I don't even noticed the time switch this time. I remember it was worse as teenager, so maybe it affects young people more than old farts ;)
I'm curious how disruptive this would be from a database perspective ? For eg, All the flight bookings to/from Cuba needs to be updated because it would have originally accounted for DST.
well https://www.iana.org/time-zones/releases/2026f has the right info. If they stored everything in the DB as UTC... this is like a DNS change. Downstream partners need to have a TTL on it.
If they still move time back in spring, they will gain 1h per person.
If they keep doing it indefinitely, they're looking at some serious profits and boost to GDP.
Haha I know a skit from 1990, where the comedian makes this exact point.
He even takes it a step further:
“Why settle for turning back time just one hour? Think about how much we f*cked up the world in the past 30 years! Let’s turn time back 30 years and fix that mess!”
This is Cuba we're talking about. Profits only matter if they go to the ruling family and friends.
That's unnecessary political stereotyping.
But what does matter in Cuba, is Savings.
The country is in shambles, beyond bankruptcy, in cases literally starving. Because of it"international" sanctions. Severe shortages of petrol, water and energy.
So it wouldn't be surprising if, by moving the clock every year in just one direction, petrol, water and electricity is saved. And it wouldn't even be suprising if that actually happens.
It's not stereotyping when it can be applied to basically every country in the world, including the US.
I thought that DST was dumb until I moved to Tokyo and find it sad that sunset is at 4pm in the winter
Sunset isn't changed by DST. You adjust your schedule. You're free to do so on your own terms, without the government forcing everyone to do the same shift at the same time for the same amount of time.
It only works when you don't have children (kindergartens and schools start at 8) or spouse (who can have a different schedule) or office work (so you don't have to be at the office at 9.)
Time has stopped being an astronomical fact, and is a social contract nowadays. It's possible that you can afford to opt out of that contract, but most people can't.
God, I would love if the EU actually got going with it.
Does anybody what's the status with solar power there? Seems like the country would have plenty of sun to use. I know that some private people in the island are running almost 24x7 on solar and batteries, but most private people, companies and specially the government are still in blackout.
Nice! I don't really care if we end up on daylight savings or not, just stop this time change madness finally please!
If you read the article it's the worst of both worlds: Keep clock time the same but start work and school 30 minutes later?
Shouldn't we just get up when the sun comes up? And if you can't see the sun, everyone can stay home.
This is the only reasonable and measured take.
(Unfortunately, it always gets derailed by highly-polarized discussions about whether to stay on DST forever or get rid of it forever. They'll be showing up here again soon enough.)
It is a reasonable take but it is not the _only_ one - I think it is arguably more reasonable to transition away from DST to ordinary "best TZ granularity approximation to zenith-occurs-at-noon" time once, and then stay (and manage) that time over the millenia to come.
I like this idea. I like it quite a lot.
But can we... uh... can we keep that as some kind of tertiary issue to solve later after we successfully stop screwing up the clocks twice every year? We don't really need to build a singular omnibus clock overhaul that will most assuredly never come to fruition, do we? :)
Swatch Beat time.
Good for them. Hope that shames the rest of the world (looking at you EU) to action too.
I have totally solved all issues. I have additional pointer on my watchface for the true position of the sun. https://photos.app.goo.gl/M95bW4XWR2NDUup46
40 odd lines just for handling Cuba alone, amazing
The diff is 23 lines long, the vast majority of which is documentation: https://github.com/eggert/tz/commit/5b5b39dae16f787740b8c0d4...
This makes sense given all of the power outages largely caused by U.S. sanctions. You would in this scenario want to have more daylight extending into the night time hours.
I don't understand the obsession with keeping the perfectly vertical sun at noon given we all work from dark to dark under winter time. What would actually help us experience daylight would NOT be moving the clocks or moving work an hour earlier or a few hours later
manually rolled datetime library screams
They're all over it before we hear about it:
3 days ago: https://github.com/eggert/tz/commit/5b5b39dae16f787740b8c0d4...
It's not even the latest change to the library!
So... Cuba is the voice of reason?
Yehh Europe is loosing its mind..
I belive this whole clock fliopity flip twice a year is a huge contributing factor to people's "unbalance", and worsening mental state... Especially the northern parts....
We humans are creatures of habit... Mess with the circadian rhythm of en entire population and expect no adverse effect.... Mhm checks out.
Calling canceling a time change mere days before it was going to happen "the voice of reason" is rich
"Days" is plenty of time, IIRC some tz changes happened hours before they had to come into effect!
Most of the world is the voice of reason actually.
This is a very European / North American problem for some reason. There are some exceptions, but in general Asia, Africa and South America don't do this.
I remember reading somewhere that we see an increased incidence of heart related ailments around the clock change, hypothesized due to this change in sleep patterns.
Switzerland never wanted it: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/society/daylight-saving-time-wh...
> a huge contributing factor to people's "unbalance", and worsening mental state.
This is surely an exaggeration.
https://clin.au.dk/display/artikel/the-transition-from-dayli...
The EU again is all talk and no action on this topic. 84% said in a poll to get rid of it back in 2018, parliament voted to end it by 2021. But here we are at the end of 2026 turning the clocks back again. Next march same thing. Honestly at this point I don't think it will ever happen, they will still be "discussing"it in 2040.
Actually “only” Germany voted back then. Like 3.79% of Germans voted. So that comes out to ~3.18M of 4.6M votes cast by Germans.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_18_...
That’s the downside of EU decision making.
> and worsening mental state
How would something that has been in effect for at least 60 years still lead to a worsening mental state over time?
Daylight saving time: an American Academy of Sleep Medicine position statement
https://aasm.org/advocacy/position-statements/daylight-savin...
The transition from daylight saving time to standard time leads to depressions https://clin.au.dk/display/artikel/the-transition-from-dayli...
Yeah, because humans existed for only 60 years.
Well most people haven't existed for 60 years. Where I'm from, DST was introduced 110 years ago and people still complain. When will the worsening mental state reach equilibrium? Or is there maybe a chance that the worsening mental state isn't due to DST?
WTF. They should abolish DST.
Why?
I don't know it this will be the case for Cuba, as it's somewhat differently placed on the map, but Russia tried DST only and had to switch to standard time and then stayed there.
Some people absolutely loves DST for some reason, but it creates stress and mental problems for people, especially in the north. The long mornings are somehow worse than the short evenings. Technically it shouldn't matter what the clock shows, but when society insists on things happening at a certain time, whether or not the sun is out becomes important.
For the Russian case see: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-28423647
> especially in the north
We don't care about the people living in the North, there are more of us living not in North and as we live in a democracy (the EU) the majority vote should cound on this.
Because it's generally senseless, and particularly for them even more so given their location.
Because DST is the wrong time; if you look at the legal implementation of DST, most countries carve out exceptions for fields where lying about the time can obviously lead to death and destruction - navigation being perhaps the main one.
What everyone missed is that DST could itself lead to much greater loss of life than we might have lost had the use of DST been mandated all the way through to e.g. large naval, air or spacecraft.
And as research into DST continues, this seems to have been not merely an abstract possibility was missed, but _the actual outcome_. DST is quite literally killing people by the thousands.