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.

Comments

Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

[olsmeister]

I guess the closer you are to the equator, the less sense it makes.

Re:Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well obviously you're not selling GPS watches with hardcoded timezones, or having a videoconference scheduled with Moroccans that now falls outside of their work hours. Otherwise you'd give a damn.

The product in your first example is bad and no-one makes products like that.
The video conference example is also bad since not everyone changes to DST at the same time anyway and you already have that problem. It's just that it now becomes less of a problem.

Re:Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

[currently_awake]

Seasonal time changes kill people, they don't make sense anywhere. The original purpose was to make use of daylight in a world where lighting was expensive. We now have cheap electric lighting everywhere, so why pay the cost of time changes?

Re:Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

[zdzichu]

They decided to cancel DST change a day before it was planned. Good luck getting your software updated to take into account new order.

Two days notice !

[Alain Williams]

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.

Re:Two days notice !

[ceoyoyo]

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.

Re:Two days notice !

[Anne Thwacks]

eg a plane will leave France and timetabled to arrive at a certain (local Moroccan) time

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?

Re:Two days notice !

[Alain Williams]

eg a plane will leave France and timetabled to arrive at a certain (local Moroccan) time

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 reason that I chose an airplane is because its published timetable depends, in part, on it leaving, say, Paris at a certain time according to French time, then arrives in Marrakech 2 hours 30 minutes later and published according to Moroccan time. The return flight, leaving 45/whatever minutes later will be published in Moroccan time. The published Moroccan times for next week will now need to be changed. This will cause confusion as to when collect friends from the airport and more importantly when to arrive for the return flight to Paris.

Rail entirely within Morocco is not so much a problem - they can just stick to Moroccan time.

Does anyone have a good argument

[haus]

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.

Re:Does anyone have a good argument

[haus]

Almost no one has a job need for daylight. The few that do will obviously base their work around that need.

If a farmer wants to harvest their crop starting at daybreak, they do not need a time change to help them figure out when the sun will rise.

Re: Does anyone have a good argument

[bill_mcgonigle]

Only if all needs are uniform, which they're not. Home Depot changes its hours with the sun despite DST. How could we ever find out when they're open, then? If only we had an Internet with integrated calendars and navigation!

Re: Does anyone have a good argument

[Kjella]

Yeah, who cares if their kids are waiting for the bus in pitch black? You idiot virgin.

Yes, it's a wonder people in Canada, northern Europe etc. survive when all our kids get eaten by a grue.

Re:Does anyone have a good argument

[Anne Thwacks]

Because it's simpler to change the time twice a year for everyone at a common time than having everyone constantly switching their hours and schedules randomly

Which totally explains why Americans change theirs different from everyone else.

Re:Wrong

[SlaveToTheGrind]

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 .

Slippery slope

[TeknoHog]

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.)

Re:No slippery slope

[angel'o'sphere]

The time change is done to keep sunrise around the same time (by the clock).
That is bollocks.
First of all you can read up why DST was introduced ... and it has nothing to do with farmers.
Secondly, if you looked at a globe and made your mind up, you would grasp what bollocks you just wrote.