Friday, July 6, 2018

That Daylight Savings Discussion

Yesterday, I essayed a short piece over the EU wanting to discuss dumping Daylight Savings Time.  Their idea....at least yesterday....they would open up a poll for a couple of weeks, and let EU folks 'vote'.

Well.....today, the German press noted in passing.....the EU computer network 'crashed' about an hour into this, from the massive number of people from across the EU who wanted to make their opinion known.

The network came back up today, but I'm guessing it's barely able to handle the traffic.

The odds of the public being 99.9 percent negative?  Well....my German wife suggested that today.

It might be the one occasion in twenty years that the EU could do something that the public was begging them to accomplish....that the Berlin crowd could never do.

It'll shock me if more than two percent of EU population is positive about Daylight Savings Time.

Note: as of 0900 Saturday, the EU server is still crashed.


2 comments:

josep-n said...

There are a lot of things I disagree with the EU on (this being one of them), but the abolition of daylight savings is a plan I'm at least happy with. If Japan can get rid of it, then what's stopping America from doing the same?

P.S. I live in Washington state (UTC-8). Speaking of time, I noticed that every comment I post has the timestamp set three hours ahead of the time where I live (e.g. if I post a comment at, say, 1:05 PM, the blog says it's 4:05 PM.) This made me think you were living somewhere in UTC-5. However, some of your articles were posted at times when the average Joe living in UTC-5 would normally be asleep (e.g. 1:31 AM in Washington = 4:31 AM in the US East Coast = 10:31 AM in Germany), so I'm wondering if you could adjust your blog's settings so as to reflect the correct time zone you're living in. Thanks.

P.P.S. Is there a way I can contact you without using the comments section? Thanks again.

Schnitzel_Republic said...

The last time I fiddled with the timestamp and general settings, goes back to 2010 when I lived in DC. There are occasions where I spend time working on an essay and I'll release it with publish settings 12 hours later to give me time to pause over or reflect on what I wrote. Sometimes, I just hit publish.

Based on the lack of will power by the House and Senate (both parties)....I don't see it changing in the US. With Trump? It's very possible that he'll set up some legislation, and then the Democrats are in a bind if they oppose it. It's hard though to find anyone today who strongly endorses it. Maybe in a group of PhD folks, they might find some logical reason to it, but most folks just find it a burden. For my wife, it'll take two weeks for her sleeping cycle to change, and it's all negative.

I think the more amusing part of this is that once the EU said it 'might' do something, and invited comments by the public (28 countries)....they didn't envision the massive negativity, and that their puny server would never be able to handle the job of hundreds of thousands wanting to comment at the same time. As of late yesterday (Sat), it was still down.