> sovereignty

Sovereignty, like other types of freedom, is entirely abstract unless you're referring to freedom to (or from) something specific. The freedom to set timezones to inconvenient values isn't a particularly valuable one.

The European ideal involves pooling of sovereignty, with the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Just as within a nation sovereignty is pooled from the individual people comprising it.

(Well, within a modern democratic nation. The UK is a constitutional monarchy in which sovereignty is delegated to parliament by the monarch, and explictly not a country of popular sovereignty).

It is probably also worth looking at how the history of time has been defined by state and private action, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_time . We're already ending up as a global civilisation that uses either UTC or UNIX timestamps "behind the scenes" everywhere out of sheer programmer convenience. Open the "network" panel in your browser and see which timezone was used to serve you this page?

> The freedom to set timezones to inconvenient values isn't a particularly valuable one.

Says who? There are tens of thousands of signatures and presumably a majority of an entire country that disagree. I don't think you should get to decide something subjective like the value of this (or what's considered inconvenient) over an entire country.

Finland already agreed to subject itself to such EU rules when it joined. Nobody is keeping it in by force.

Of course. What does that have to do with the discussion at hand about this rule's value? Are you saying they aren't allowed to complain or that the EU should not consider delegating such decisions because they initially agreed not to? The EU would be wise to delegate DST authority to the countries themselves. Just because a country chooses to be part of this whole and it is primarily positive doesn't mean they can't complain of things that are negative.

Oh come on, that's such a stupid brute-force argument. Yes, they did, no that doesn't mean there is no value in discussing if it is good that this specific thing is regulated, or that people aren't allowed to be unhappy about it.

The point of joining a group is that all parties need to compromise. Not an expert in the issue, but article seems to imply that Finland is the only one in 28 member states which is really unhappy.

If everyone else doesn't mind removing DST, sure, whatever. But what if there are 8 countries which really don't?

BTW, Finland can just start ignoring this rule. Nothing will happen. Despite popular opinion, the EU can't impose shit on it's members if one truly doesn't want it.

Then we'll find out during the process, and discuss what that means (which I suspect would mean "nothing changes", since changing things is harder than maintaining the status quo, and I think it's unlikely Finnland will care enough to want to be the only exception).

Switching DST at the same moment keeps the delta time the same.

I'm from one EU country, live in another, I know that the delta between the two is always 2 hours.

Because EU and US switch DST at different times, in the multi-national software companies I worked there is this two week period when the delta changes, and there are mails and mis-scheduled things all around.

It's not a huge thing, but what is the benefit of each country randomly switching times, just for the sake of sovereignty. Next people will advocate using true solar time and getting rid of full hour based deltas.

> It's not a huge thing, but what is the benefit of each country randomly switching times, just for the sake of sovereignty.

It's not just for the sake of sovereignty. The article clearly gives a reason why Finland might want to but other countries might not. Your individual reasons may not apply to someone across the continent just as someone's US east coast reason may not apply to Arizona. That type of thinking ("why not", "just for the sake of sovereignty", "here's my anecdote", etc) is what causes this type of federalist mis-representation so far from the problems of locals.

Some people are from one US state and live in another. Despite your anecdote being only yours and ignoring the wishes of entire countries, I don't think it's even a valid point to centralize DST above the country level.

> I don't think it's even a valid point to centralize DST above the country level

What about:

- measurement systems (metric, ....)

- unicode

- electrical grid frequencies (50 Hz in all of EU)

- unified road driving rules (green/red lights, ...)

- the euro currency

- electrical wiring standards/colors

- paper sizes (A4, letter, ...)

You could argue the same thing for pretty much all standards.

Why not let each group of people pick it's own set of rules which perfectly suits them.

That is the point of standardization. It drives costs down, just like the invention of the shipping container massively improved transport efficiency.

> You could argue the same thing for pretty much all standards

Of course, and you can argue colors of the sky and everything else. Back to the subject at hand concerning DST, its value is affected by presence of daylight, and that is different for different people. Not sure why you are bringing up a bunch of non-daylight related items into the discussion for comparison. Maybe some standardized law about requiring air conditioning or some law mandating sunglasses at certain hours on the clock would be more apropos. Regardless, comparisons here do nothing but deviate from the DST discussion.

Obviously for some things commonality has value and for some things it doesn't, can't just say "let everyone choose everything then" as some form of counter or we cannot discuss productively.

I wish everyone would just use UTC for coordination. Then I wouldn't schedule my time around a meeting at "3PM GMT" only to discover that the Brit who scheduled it didn't know it was summertime.

This confusion is made more prevalent by Windows, which has consistently claimed the UK is in some variant of "GMT", or even "UTC", during summer, often with a timezone name like "GMT Summer Time" (the UK uses BST in summer). For example, right now, the Windows 10 timezone selector is claiming London is at UTC+00:00, even though it's at UTC+01:00 for summer, and earlier versions of Windows would claim it's in GMT.

This wouldn't fix anything, because people would still have to convert UTC to their local time before agreeing to anything, and they'd make the same mistakes in that process ("Shit, are we +7 or +8 right now?")

Not so much, because they'd be more aware of their UTC offset. I usually get people not even knowing that their timezone changes with DST.

The key here is the Brit said GMT aka UTC your the one that messed up here

No, the Brit thought he was scheduling it for 3pm on his wall clock, because he thought "GMT means the time we use here in London" but London was actually using BST that day. Source: have seen this from many many coworkers who should know better.

Yep. As well as a bunch of "10 AM PST" when they meant PDT. Nowadays I have to correct everyone as to their timezone.

If they use PST in the summer you can be pretty sure they mean PDT, at least, especially if you are somewhere where the abbreviation is unambiguously US Pacific Standard Time. With GMT/UTC there's some chance they were trying to express the time in a "standardized" way.

Yes, if you're already familiar with PDT... Not so much if someone says "X AM PST" and you just plug it into your calendar.

I use a world clock with the cities I communicate with frequently added.

But then again, being in Australia, and most business being done in the US, Europe and Asia, you’re not going to memorise all the time zones.

Switzerland tried to not adopt DST when the rest of Europe adopted it. It did not go well, they ended up freely choosing to follow. It's not sovereignty, it's just plain common sense. (European countries are generally much more tightly integrated than US states, even more so when you consider things like public transport - it's easy to live a life spanning 3 countries if you live near a border.)

At least they got to choose. I only argue for the choice, not the value of the choice. Finland would likely be wise to keep with the rest of their time zone wrt DST, but I think as an entire country they can make that determination (or fix it if they were wrong) just like the Swiss.

I understand what you say on an idealistic level, but of all things, we (as a species) really ought to be able to agree on what time it is. Time doesn't stop at the border and in this particular case, it would be silly to come up with even more convoluted systems just because somebody wants to be a snowflake.

We understand each other on an idealistic level because I agree with you. But leaving idealism behind and focusing on practicalities of today, while time zones exist and time is changed based on daylight, places with wildly different values that affect that change should have some say in it.

The whole point of a trade union is to standardize things so that you don't have to waste resources customizing your business to the requirements of a bunch of tiny edge-case countries.

Concur in the general sense. I think DST effects are different enough geographically to delegate to at least the country level though. That the point of a trade union is to standardize things does not mean it needs to standardize everything.

Of all the valid arguments for and against DST, I think "sovereignty" isn't one of them.

This is misinterpreting the argument. Sovereignty isn't used as an argument for or against DST. Wildly differing daylight hours is used to argue for or against DST, sovereignty just keeps those with these large differences from imposing on one another.