There are good sides to DST, such as coming home “earlier” (by the sun clock but not by the social clock) from school or work and therefore having more hours of daylight during the free time after work. These positive effects may go beyond subjective feelings. A study has shown for example that activity increases with longer evening daylight (Goodman et al., 2014) – albeit with small biological effect sizes (≈6% difference in the daily activity between the Standard Time of the year and DST, adjusted for photoperiod). Interestingly these results of the above study were culture-specific: a significant increase was mainly observed in Europe and to some extent in Australia, while no significant effects or even slightly negative effects were seen in the United States and Brazil.

Fucking duh. This is the sticking point for me, and I am disappointed that the article doesn't mention the effect of latitude here. Very easy for muricans to say "DST is not useful" when these fuckers never get pitch-black night before 6pm or full daylight before 6am ST.

Brussels is on the same latitude as Calgary. ST robs every office worker of one hour of useful daylight. That's it. That's the whole argument for permanent DST. Businesses will not change their opening hours, so permanent ST means a net loss of one active hour in the day for every office worker. Permanent DST in Europe means someone working 9-6 would not have to drive home at night for 4 months of the year and could maybe even take the dog for a walk in the evening sun.

You realize there are places without it, and they're fine, correct?

I'd argue not every job will always be 9-5, so you still get people having to explain working hours with non-UTC timezones anyway, whereas all timezone conversions are eliminated if everyone uses UTC.

Yeah you're absolutely right that it does create a tradeoff. My experience has just been that I'd usually consider it a worthwhile tradeoff. In general, the number of people who have to deal with setting meetings is lower than the number of people who attend meetings, especially when you take into account multinational companies.

And when you're attending a meeting, you only care about knowing what time it has been scheduled for already. It's in scheduling that you have to work out when is going to be best for your audience, and I'm of the opinion that the distinction between "what time is this in my time zone and their time zone?" and "where does this time sit in relation to their working day?" is net neutral. With one aspect being a strict positive and the other being a net neutral (in my opinion), I think it still wins out and becomes worthwhile.

Fair enough. Personally I and many others in northern Europe (and other places far from the equator) feel depressed in winter due to the highly reduced sunlight so removing DST isn't just as obvious as "people will feel better", because DST at least in theory helps with that.

Edit: lol people are really mad about this 😂