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Morocco Decides To Scrap Seasonal Time Changes (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Morocco has decided to scrap winter time and will instead keep its clocks at summer time, GMT+1, all year around. Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is the time measured on the Earth's zero degree line of longitude, or meridian. The announcement comes less than two days before the clocks would have gone back by one hour on Sunday. Avoiding the switch would save "an hour of natural light", Administrative Reform Minister Mohammed Ben Abdelkader told Maghreb Arabe Press. The north African nation joins a number of others, mainly in Africa and Asia, which do not use daylight saving.
GMT is *not* a reference time zone. It used to be decades ago, but since GMT is subject to DST like the rest of Europe, it no longer serves that purpose.
Had you spent 30 seconds looking for a source to cite for this, you would have discovered you're simply wrong. Here are the actual facts, right from the horse's mouth:
Greenwich Mean Time or GMT is the clock time at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London. It is the same all year round and is not affected by Summer Time or Daylight Saving Time .
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GMT is also a time zone, used by the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK) when Daylight Saving Time is not in use , from October to March.
GMT is still widely used as the standard time against which all the other time zones in the world are referenced .
Meh. Morocco changes their clocks for Ramadan if it occurs in the summer. They're used to confusion. When I was there nobody was sure if the time was going to change until the morning it did change. I had a plane to catch.
Morocco was different from France before, and will be different from France after the change. And very few people in Morocco have any regard for time anyway - I am pretty sure it runs on "African Time" ie an hour late for everything. I think you chose the wrong example here.
The reality is that DST sucks. In some countries, the length of the day changes by less than an hour anyway. Here in the UK, it changes (gradually) between 18 hours of daylight and 6 hours of daylight. So DST might be considered to "help" for about an hour, for about a month, During that month, dawn and dusk are not when your body clock expects, leading to more accidents, especially for people driving to or from work. Six months later, it goes the other way, with similar "benefits".
As for the theory that it helps farmers - I have news for you - cows and sheep don't wear watches, not even Apple ones, and goats would disregard them even if they could tell the time. The sun shines and rain falls with absolutely no regard for the church clock, and have done since church clocks were introduced roughly 1,000 years ago. So, no. No use to farmers. But, changing the (solar) time that "Farmer's World" is broadcast, probably costs it significant audience share.
As for political muppets "thinking", what planet are you on?
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