[Info-vax] EU will abandon daylight savings time in 2021

[Phillip Helbig undress to reply]

In article <7c659980-6dfc-494e-a85f-14329f46a087 at googlegroups.com>, Hans
Vlems <jhlmvlems at gmail.com> writes: 

> In reply to Phillip's remark that some countries have the option to
> return to their proper time zone: 

I don't know if that is the case.  There has been some discussion about 
it.  What the EU has said is that each country can decide to have 
permanent normal time or permanent daylight-saving time.

> how may countries in Europe are west
> of Greenwich? Put differently, have a look at the map how the 0 meridian
> divides Europe. 

Spain.  It should be in the same zone as Portugal.

> I'm in the Netherlands, tiny country and its around 5 degrees east of
> Greenwich. So that woul put us on UK time. 

Right.  However, it makes more sense to be on the same time as Germany.  
It would be bad to draw straight time-zone lines.  Better is to draw 
them at the closest national borders, which is what should be done but 
with exceptions for small countries next to large ones.  But some are 
definitely wrong, such as Spain.  Perhaps even France should be on 
Greenwich time.

> Brexit aside, most of our commercial stuf is done with Germany. Opting
> for the German time zone will work, before DSTgot introduced we did just
> that even though it gets us up rather early in the morning. If Germany
> would elect for DST (UTC+2) permanently then we'd be even more out of
> sync with the sun. 

Right.  This shows how the time-zone issue (really a separate question) 
is related to the choice of DST.

The decision should have been: stop switching twice a year (personally 
not a big deal, but I would say stop), but then that means everyone is 
on normal time.  One could then indpendently think about whether Spain 
should be in the same zone as Portugal and so on.