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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.
I guess the closer you are to the equator, the less sense it makes.
With this little warning just consider the confusion that this will cause. Computer systems with time changes programmed in; transport crossing international boundaries, eg a plane will leave France and timetabled to arrive at a certain (local Moroccan) time; diaries printed months ago and already on sale, etc. Did the political muppets think about this ? For anything like this 18 months is needed.
i am hard pressed to think of any reason why we keep going through with this ritual. Pick a time and stick to it. If you have a specific need for daylight, schedule appropriately.
It seems there is a lot of software that automatically changes the time for you. It won't be Y2K but it will be interesting to hear what happens if everything doesn't get updated in time. It is hard enough doing meeting with people in Arizona at this time of the year but at least software like Outlook keep the times right.
Think of the history that will be wiped out when people in the future can't be sure what time something happened in the past.
Actually GMT is consistent and doesn't change. It's not UTC but it's close (insert smiley emoji here).
Britain, the home of GMT is currently, at least for the next 12 hours or so, on British Summer Time (BST), an hour ahead of GMT and UTC. The "clocks go back" Sunday 28th October at 02:00 in the morning resulting in a return to us being on GMT.
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 .
* * *
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 .
Step 1: People working 8 am to 4 pm
Step 2: Clocks shifted so that people start work 1 hour earlier wrt the sun, but still nominally 8-16
Step 3: People getting tired in the mornings and gradually shifting their workday to 9-17
Step 4: GOTO 1
This is my issue with DST. Once you detach the definition of time from (suitably quantized) solar time, you lose all sense of reference. I'm OK with changing working schedules, but at least if you keep noon at 12, it's easier to see how things are changing. (Imagine changing the measures of length and weight willy-nilly just because some things feel too short or too fat.)
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
(insert smiley emoji here).
You mean :-)
They fell for an old troll trick.
For any story, write a post with the subject "Wrong". Pick a fact from the summary that could plausibly be wrong, and then convincingly write that it is wrong.
Try it, it works.
GMT doesn't include DST changes, it's fixed and exactly the same as UTC.
In the summer the UK goes on to BST, or British Summer Time, or GMT+1, or UTC+1. But GMT stays fixed.
The main bit of ambiguity is that astronomers were using GMT to mean the period from noon to noon, so that all their observations from one night fell on the same date. That's pretty obscure though.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Stupid moving the clock around. In the agricultural days, farmers, that's all they did...farm. What difference did it make? NONE. it was all a con job, to "allow" people to have what they though was more free time after work to go do things. IE: spend money. The old Indian saying is best. "only white man would cut bottom from blanket, sew it on top and think he had longer blanket" Just put the clocks either on standard time or daylight savings time and LEAVE IT.
The time change is done to keep sunrise around the same time (by the clock). So there is no GOTO 1 step because once you've shifted the clock so the start of the day coincides with sunrise, there's no need to shift the clock any further.
If the common reference were noon (sun furthest overhead), there would be no issue. In winter sunrise would come a bit later, sunset a bit sooner. But people like to (or liked to in the past) start their day with sunrise. In winter this assures you have the maximum amount of the short daylight available. In summer it assures you don't waste any daylight when sunrise shifts to very early (by the clock).
But in modern society, aside from a few agricultural jobs, the omnipresence of artificial lighting means there's little need to continue to do this. The only real argument for it I can think of is that you can guarantee at least one of the commute times (morning or evening) happens in the safety of daylight. Whereas if you keep the time synchronized around noon, in extreme northern latitudes both morning and evening commute would happen in darkness during winter. But the research I've seen says the time change itself is much more dangerous to people's health than the elevated risk of commuting in the dark.
The UK have DST, yes. But that is not GMT. ... like UTC. Read a book about it, it is to complicated to explain the difference between GMT and UTC in a /. post.
GMT is fixed
Point is: you are wrong.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Ugarte might still be alive, and Victor Laszlo might’ve had an easier time getting out of there.
#DeleteChrome
If you're going to come across so strong and authoritative it would help if you were actually right. Have some knowledge:
GMT is a reference timezone linked to mean solar time.
GMT does not have any daylight savings time.
The UK does not use GMT, they use British Standard Time (BST) which includes Daylight savings (UTC+0 and UTC+1) depending on the time of the year.
Despite the UK's standard time not being linked to GMT directly, some countries legally do reference GMT as their reference timezones.
In the English language generally when not speaking scientifically then GMT and UTC are synonymous. https://en.oxforddictionaries....
With this little warning just consider the confusion that this will cause. Computer systems with time changes programmed in; transport crossing international boundaries, eg a plane will leave France and timetabled to arrive at a certain (local Moroccan) time; diaries printed months ago and already on sale, etc. Did the political muppets think about this ? For anything like this 18 months is needed.
Oh, the humanity! Whatever will people DO when their automatic systems briefly display the wrong time?!?
Anything that operates internationally or trans-nationally should just be running off GMT/ZULU time anyway, so it shouldn't adversely impact that.
As for what can the common Moroccan do on the ground about this horrific, nightmare situation in which their watches or clocks or computers briefly display an incorrect time of day... well, they could simply undo whatever change their automatic system made, et voila. Fixed.
By the way, do you know what the prevalence is in Morocco of automatic time-keeping systems versus manual ones? Isn't it just possible that more people have to change their watches manually, and as word gets out, (hey, we're not doing that stupid twice-yearly clock and watch change ritual anymore!) and I'm pretty sure it will, they'll be talking about this over tea and coffee and very nearly everyone WILL get the message, I predict, that the change, even right before the event, will result in LESS confusion rather than more? I'm confident that most of these automatically changing systems can be configured NOT to automatically change, and if they can't, they really should be replaced.
If the system cannot be fixed, then whoever made it should be fired for making a system that stupid; there's no excuse for that kind of incompetence in the modern day! Anything like that, however, I strongly suspect CAN be fixed, because this is 2018 and all the crap like that has long since been replaced with something created by people who exhibited basic fucking competency in programming. I hope the rest of the world follows the example set by Morocco, (a sentence I didn't think I'd ever write,) not in taking-over and occupying a neighboring country, but rather in abolishing the abject stupidity of changing clocks for what turned out to be no good goddamned reason twice a year.
DOWN WITH THE STUPIDITY OF DST!
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
When I first replied nearly six hours ago, this nonsense had only attracted one reflexive "informative" mod.
After I and five other people pointed out how parent is laughably, demonstrably incorrect (including actual supporting citations), it continued to get modded all the way to +5.
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