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Morocco Decides To Scrap Seasonal Time Changes (bbc.com) 95

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.
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Morocco Decides To Scrap Seasonal Time Changes

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  • by olsmeister ( 1488789 ) on Saturday October 27, 2018 @08:05AM (#57544649)
    I guess the closer you are to the equator, the less sense it makes.
    • by 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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by 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.

        • by zdzichu ( 100333 ) on Saturday October 27, 2018 @12:03PM (#57545263) Homepage Journal

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

          • by GNious ( 953874 )

            having seem companies panic when Morocco switched to Ramadan time ... nothing new here

          • by v1 ( 525388 )

            i was JUST thinking that. I worked at a school several years ago when they decided to mess with DST hours. About 100 computers running an older OS were not going to get an update to correct the DST change, so we had to manually change 100 clocks. Then (2 weeks?) later we had to fix them again, because the OS changed them when it shouldn't because there was no way to stop it from trying to adjust for DST.

            It won't be the end of the world, but it it WILL be a big headache for some, and in many cases, an une

      • If you sell GPS watches with hardcoded timezones, you deserve to go bankrupt.
        That video conference can be rescheduled.

    • 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?
  • Two days notice ! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Alain Williams ( 2972 ) <addw@phcomp.co.uk> on Saturday October 27, 2018 @08:26AM (#57544687) Homepage

    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.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Don't be so naive. If more time was allowed, the system would just try to exert the norm and no change would be made.
      It's uncomfortable but not catastropic. Other regions don't change and they will join them.

    • Re:Two days notice ! (Score:4, Informative)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 ) on Saturday October 27, 2018 @09:17AM (#57544799)

      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 changes their clocks for Ramadan if it occurs in the summer

        Isn't that cheating? Or do they change it back to their geographical time during ramadan?

      • Confused former Muslim here. Why did they change the clocks for Ramadan exactly? I've literally never heard of such a thing.

        Of course, that doesn't mean you're wrong. Even before I turned to apostasy, I was a pretty terrible Muslim.

        I do get the not knowing until the morning of (or actually the night before). The start of Ramadan is based on the Moon, so you don't know the exact date until the night before (although you usually know it's going to be one of 2-3 days).

        • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          I have no idea. I assumed it was to make fasting easier. If you sleep in an extra hour in the morning you've got one hour less of sunlight. Except I think the change was in the other direction.

          News story from last year. No explanation though.
          https://www.moroccoworldnews.c... [moroccoworldnews.com]

    • Re:Two days notice ! (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anne Thwacks ( 531696 ) on Saturday October 27, 2018 @11:04AM (#57545103)
      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?

      • 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

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Anything that operates internationally or trans-nationally should just be running off GMT/ZULU time anyway, so it shouldn't adversely impact that.
        So you want people who fly once in their lifetime to know that the plane at their airport is nodeparting 13:00 local time but at 13:00 ZULU? And you exoect them to calculate the correct time themselves?

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • The idea here is that the airport would (as I suspect they already do, esp. for an international flight,) operate on GMT/Z.
            No, they operate on local time. What else would they do?

            People simply underestimate how complicated it is in real life to work in your head in a different time zone.

            The idea of what I was writing was that to freak out and demand they delay a minor change like this to the status quo, just because they didn't give very much lead-time, seems overblown and almost hysterical, hence the sarc

  • by haus ( 129916 ) on Saturday October 27, 2018 @08:29AM (#57544689) Journal

    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.

    • If you have a specific need for daylight, schedule appropriately.

      Often, schedules need to match other schedules, outside of our control. For instance, many people can't just decide to shift their work schedule.

    • If you have a specific need for daylight, schedule appropriately.

      I tried, but the bank manager refused to open the bank just for me.

    • Because without DST it gets light at 430 in the morning and gets dark at 730. This negatively impacts utility bills. Move it forward one hour and you just saved a ton of carbon. Sure, if you don't give a shit about the planet we understand why you'd oppose DST.
      • This has been studied multiple times and the energy savings, at best, are minor. It's not 1945 anymore, and we no longer use a significant fraction of our electricity just for lighting. In hot climates, it can even be counter-productive, as it's better if everyone is at the office later in the afternoon and you only have to keep one, large building cool than it is for everyone to go home during the heat of the day and crank up their home AC.

  • 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.

    • On any UNIX/GNU Linux (see what I did there?) terminal, ask it "cal 1752" and check out the entry for September. People roited to get those missing days back.
  • by TeknoHog ( 164938 ) on Saturday October 27, 2018 @09:18AM (#57544803) Homepage Journal

    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.)

    • by Anonymous Coward

      High sun at noon splits daylight in half, requiring people to adjust their alarm clock to take advantage of an earlier sunrise.

      Instead of pinning 12 to high sun, we should pin 7(?) to sunrise.*

      This method maximizes daylight letting you wake up the same time everyday.

      Ideally, as most people get their time for their cell phones, "7" could be adjusted everyday to match the current sunrise. No one would notice a time change of a minute or two.

      * yes, i realize "7" would only be true for a specific location in

    • 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 am
      • 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.

    • but at least if you keep noon at 12

      What do you call noon? You talking the time when the sun is at its apex? Large portions of the world's populations don't feature this in their current time, not in summer, nor in winter if they actually change their clocks.

      If you want a reference, get a mechanical or electrical wristwatch and throw your sundial away.

  • 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.
  • Ugarte might still be alive, and Victor Laszlo might’ve had an easier time getting out of there.

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