Morocco abruptly drops clock change

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-45995634

by Someone • 8 years ago

149 195 8 years ago

ocdtrekkie2• 8 years ago

I assume a out-of-band Windows update will be imminent then. Half of out-of-band Windows updates are zero-days, the other half are frantic attempts to cope with countries changing their time zones on short notice.

plantain• 8 years ago

Obligatory link to the tireless volunteers who maintain the timezone databases and cope with the last minute, sometimes even retrospective timezone changes.

https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2018-October/027099.html

dmitrygr• 8 years ago

example retroactive change: https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2018-October/027092.html

this stuff really is fascinating

8bitsrule4• 8 years ago

"El Pasoans were time rebels" :)

Oh that Johnny Yuma.

sonnyblarney5• 8 years ago

Maybe a few months heads up would be nice. You know the world is integrated now: flights, trains, shipments etc. etc..

toyg11• 8 years ago

I think that’s the only real objection to this move. Any country is entitled to do what it wants regarding DST, but transitions should be orderly and planned well in advance, not imposed from one day to the next.

I guess it shows how Morocco is not exactly a democratic country, so you get the classic tyrant-style decision-making here and there.

sonnyblarney5• 8 years ago

I think it has nothing to do with Democracy. Frankly, central authority should make this kind of stuff easier because a central entity can take into consideration all of the bureaucracies and do what needs to be done.

In Democracies, pushing through such changes has to be a nightmare - so many competing interests, populism, you have to find the right legislative window, legislation is burdened with irrelevant stuff, bureaucracies are resistant to change etc..

csomar3• 8 years ago

I guess it shows how Morocco is not exactly a democratic country, so you get the classic tyrant-style decision-making here and there.

It has nothing to do with Democracy but incompetence. Many people think that democracy brings modernity and order. It is really the other way around.

spiritcat• 8 years ago

eh, good good test for all those systems so it might go smoothly when we finally do it here

nancyp• 8 years ago

US should do the same. Drop DST please! but not abruptly with a Trumpy Tweet.

umanwizard7• 8 years ago

Time zones in the US are a matter for the sovereign states, not the federal government.

There already exists at least one US member state that doesn’t practice DST: Arizona.

lozaning• 8 years ago

This was one of my favorite things about living in Arizona. Leaving work when it's dark out is no fun.

randyrand3• 8 years ago

Even then the states don't really have control. Me and my friends can decide to do whatever we want. We listen to the government because it's hard to coordinate and no one else has stepped up. No one really has any control.

InclinedPlane6• 8 years ago

Not exactly, they do not have complete control. States can choose their timezone, they can choose whether to adopt DST or not. They cannot choose to switch to DST all year round though.

Edit:

http://timezonereport.com/?page_id=313

The bottom line here is that a state (or other political subdivision — see the Wayne County, KY reference below) can only:

- Opt out of DST

- If not opted out of DST, you must advance an hour starting on the second Sunday of March and ending on the first Sunday in November.

- Petition the Secretary of the Department of Transportation and request a change of time zone designation.

wahern• 8 years ago

Interestingly, this is an enumerated power under the U.S. Constitution. Article 1 section 8 explicitly grants Congress the power to "fix the Standard of Weights and Measures".

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_One_of_the_United_Stat...

sys_64738• 8 years ago

I'd also like to see New England move to Atlantic Standard Time. I was there last winter and it got dark before 5pm!

Arubis3• 8 years ago

I love this idea, though I suspect economic ties to NYC will prevent it.

gbear605• 8 years ago

Massachusetts would switch just to spite NYC.

xxpor• 8 years ago

Youd love Seattle, where sunset is at roughly 4:20 in late December.

Otoh, it doesn't get truly dark until 10 in June.

8bitsrule4• 8 years ago

Even moreso Spokane (or elsewhere in the easternmost parts of the PST zone, e.g. Las Vegas) where the sun has set even earlier ... say, 4-ish.

InclinedPlane6• 8 years ago

Yup. Depending on your working hours you can get up when it's dark, go to work, and it'll be dark outside when you leave.

_cerv• 8 years ago

I absolutely fucking love it. It makes up for the lack of snow or cold and dry days.

Four months where the sun is under 30°, where the color temp from daylight casts everything with a golden evening glow. A glance outside feels timeless as your brain tells you that it should be 2pm, but it looks like evening. It’s even more magical in the winter with that rare snowfall. The colors shift to a purple and grey when the sky is dark and filled with ice. When it clears, the spectrum shifts to thousands of shades of blues over a hundred minutes after sunset. There is an added bit of splendor when the world is awake and continues with its work but the sun is down.

I just moved back from 40° north to 48°, and those early sunsets, colorful days, and summer twilights were sorely missed.

ravenstine• 8 years ago

Aren't enough clocks connected to the internet that the clock change could happen gradually rather than abruptly?

ocdtrekkie2• 8 years ago

You could do something like Google has done with the Leap Smear on a larger scale, but the better question is why does the clock change need to happen at all? There's really no reason for it.

It would be vastly easier for businesses which wish to let their employees out early enough to enjoy the sunlight to change their hours for a few months than for the entirety of society to change their sense of time.

Also, you'd be surprised how many clocks are not Internet-connected, as a lot of people still rely on clocks on their microwave, oven, car radio, etc. And in my case, I am absolutely reliant on one (or, often, like three) completely dumb alarm clocks, because they aren't subject to the whims of my phone doing dumb things like not ringing when it should.

sbov• 8 years ago

It would be vastly easier for businesses which wish to let their employees out early enough to enjoy the sunlight to change their hours for a few months than for the entirety of society to change their sense of time.

Actually it wouldn't, because businesses have their hours set based upon the entirety of society's sense of time.

zzo38computer4• 8 years ago

Yes. The clock doesn't need to change. You can schedule your employees out early to enjoy sun if they like to do, regardless of what the clock says.

If you are scheduling a meeting, you will specify the time by the clock, but how to decide what time, can be decided by whatever else is applicable, such as when it is light or dark outside, or other considerations, and then know what time on the clock that time will be, to schedule.

Yes, many clock won't and shouldn't need to be Internet. Even so, you can also to use a sundial or pocketwatch, anyways. I also use "dumb" alarm clocks, actually.

dsl• 8 years ago

Two different things. There is the clock which tracks the time (simplifying here), and the timezone data that helps display the clock. Changing observances requires you to push an update to computers to tell them that humans have decided to change the rendering of the time but the time itself does not change.

seanalltogether• 8 years ago

Can't imagine any part of Africa would benefit from daylight savings changes. Morocco only fluctuates between 10h and 14h of daylight at its extremes.

Arubis3• 8 years ago

Morocco in particular would benefit from synchronizing time changes with Spain as a major trade partner.

toyg11• 8 years ago

Spain will likely drop DST in a year or two, like most EU countries, but it’s not clear which side it will “land”. In this context, maybe Morocco is using this leap forward as a lobbying effort to nudge Spain towards the timezone it prefers.

umeshunni• 8 years ago

Brazil abruptly decided to delay the start of daylight savings time by a few weeks due to elections and a number of (unpatched?) Android phones showed the wrong time: https://androidcommunity.com/brazils-dst-change-inadvertentl...

JshWright• 8 years ago

I'm amazed that was the extent of it.

cesarb• 8 years ago

It wasn't abrupt, tzdata 2018c from January already had that change: https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHEA-2018:0232

What was abrupt was that this month they decided to delay it even more due to the ENEM (https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exame_Nacional_do_Ensino_M%C3%...), and a few days later went back on that, keeping only the previous delay due to the elections.

What happened with smartphones is that most are configured to automatically track the timezone from the carrier, and some carriers didn't set it up correctly. So when the normal date for DST arrived this Sunday, these phones entered daylight savings time, even though this should happen only two weeks later.

(And of course, there's always the servers with unpatched software from 2016, and the servers with the Oracle JVM which for some reason uses its own copy of the tzdata database...)

forinti• 8 years ago

Tell me about it. I had to update databases, linux servers, and java installations (tzupdater did not solve my java 8 issues, so I had to force JVMs into Etc/GMT+3).

I like daylight savings time, but I think it would be easier to just go to work an hour earlier.

neonate2• 8 years ago

I'm glad they decided to keep summer time. I live in fear that we'll decide to abolish DST but keep the darker evenings all year round.

jstanley2• 8 years ago

Your timezone does not dictate how dark your evenings are. The days have exactly the same amount of daylight regardless of what numbers you choose to label the hours with.

danharaj• 8 years ago

The hours I spend at work, on the other hand...

InclinedPlane6• 8 years ago

The easiest way to shift the schedule of everyone in an area is just to shift the time.

function_seven3• 8 years ago

Yours might not, but mine does. Evenings for me are from ~5pm to bedtime. Unfortunately they're determined by the clock, not the sun.

neonate2• 8 years ago

You're talking about the diurnal cycle, but what we call evenings are defined by social convention and certainly do get darker after the November time shift.

yen223• 8 years ago

I propose we solve the obesity crisis by shifting all weights by 10kg down.

iav• 8 years ago

Quite a few people work relative to market trading hours and customary times to hold earnings calls and roadshows. Sales people work around their store business hours. Schools have fixed schedules. Hours sadly dictate schedules for most people

salvar3• 8 years ago

The timezone does dictate what part of the day we generally call "evening" though.

alexdumitru5• 8 years ago

Most of Europe will move to winter time tomorrow and also abolish DST and I have the same feelings about it as you. I prefer darker mornings than evenings, as I've never been an early riser.

notanote• 8 years ago

To clarify, the European Commission had a public consultation on DST[1]. The response was strongly in favour of ending the clock changes, and furthermore favoured permanent DST. The EC has called on member states to come up with an appropriate way of accommodating the public’s preference, telling them to coordinate so that time differences across borders are kept to a sensible minimum.

No decision has been made yet to either abolish DST, or move the clock forward one hour permanently, and it might not happen at all. The member states are supposed to reply before next summer, so that the switch to DST next spring could be the last time changing clocks in Europe.

[1]http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-5302_en.htm

ginko• 8 years ago

You've never been an early riser so you prefer to have to wake up one hour early forever?

fyfy18• 8 years ago

For your location that may be an issue, but in other parts of Europe keeping summer time all year around will mean the sun doesn't rise until nearly 10am. The real issue here is such a large location is in the same timezone. The sun rises over 1 1/2 hours earlier in the East of Poland compared to the West of Spain, even though they are in the same timezone.

labster• 8 years ago

People who want the solar day to start at 1AM must love languages like SQL that start at index 1. But hey, at least it's consistent with year 1.

Markoff• 8 years ago

that's exactly what's already proposing Slovak ministry of labor meaning you will have sunrise in summer at 3:30 AM, despite out of Slovak participants in survey 53% voted for permanent DST and in whole EU survey it was even more favourable, let's hope for EU wide agreement on permanent DST, otherwise i will be rather switching time twice a year, despite voting against it in survey

expathacker5• 8 years ago

Türkiye did this a few years ago. Working remotely from here for a California company has been less than fun during the winter as my work day now ends at 21:00, severely hampering evening social / music outings.

egeozcan2• 8 years ago

You are working remotely, I'm sure you will find the flexibility to adjust your working hours by at least 1-2 hours?

By the way, is there a reason you called it Türkiye instead of Turkey?

toyg11• 8 years ago

It’s the native spelling, a bit like Beijing vs Peking. I reckon he’s a Turk and so he’s entitled to call his homeland what he wants :)

expathacker5• 8 years ago

Well, I have an active social life, and I'm not a big fan of working in the evening, so sure I can adjust it, but it's frustrating.

Turkey is a bird. The Turkish word for Turkey is Hindi (which is funny, because the Turkish word for India is Hindistan, -stan means country, so a literal translation of Hindistan is "Country of Turkey")

Türkiye is the Turkish spelling for the Republic of Turkey.

zzo38computer4• 8 years ago

I don't like DST and think that instead the time zone offset should be set so that 12:00 is at approximately solar noon, and then count the seconds without changing for DST or anything else.

glandium• 8 years ago

Where I live, solar noon is around 11:30am. The sun rising at 4:30am and setting at 6:30pm in the summer is sad. It's even worse in the winter when the sun sets at 4:30pm.

(And I come from a country where solar noon is 2pm in the summer, making evenings quite enjoyable)

zzo38computer4• 8 years ago

My opinion is, if you do not want to have dinner when it is dark, then have dinner when it is not dark. It is dark or light depending on what season, and what location, rather than the clock, anyways, whether you use DST or not.

The clock is good can tell you the time and how much time is passed and to synchronize the schedule for TV shows and cron events on computer and whatever, but is dark independently from that. If solar noon is at approximately 12:00 then the time doesn't jump (causing many problems with appointments and complications with other stuff that it doesn't need), and it will match with a sundial approximately and closely enough, but also that between for example 01:00 and 13:00 is going to be twelve hours, without needing to deal with DST.

(Avoiding DST is simplifying the computer programming too, as well as many other stuff too, so that is also good.)

randyrand3• 8 years ago

Why is that important to you? Never once have I cared that solar noon is not 12:00.

Symbiote2• 8 years ago

It's worth keeping Greenwich Mean Time as the time used in Greenwich, London and Britain. When arranging meetings etc, it's sometimes confusing to people far away from Britain that, during the summer, it's not "GMT" in London. That would be worse if Britain decided to use GMT+1 permanently.

What other countries do leads on from that, otherwise there's not much point to timezones.

8bitsrule4• 8 years ago

Occurs to me that, technically, for those of us who are wired, we could end this eternal time-battle once and for all.

Since we're having our locations tracked anyway, each of us could be our own time-zone, have whatever time each of us wants... on a whim. Coordinated-by-device-times!

This week we might go mostly-retro and arrange our meetings by local-solar-noon. Next week, full-retro, by local moon-phase.

ganonm2• 8 years ago

Why can't we just get rid of time zones altogether and just use UTC exclusivsly? The amount of productivity lost to dealing with them is immeasurably high. I proposed this over dinner with some friends recently and they thought it was nuts, but within 20 minutes of discussion I think I had convinced most of them (or they just wanted me to shut up). Maybe once we colonise Mars and the meaning of a day becomes more vague, this will become the de facto way of communicating time.

jimktrains2• 8 years ago

Because that still doesn't solve the problem of having to know the local offset to know if a proposed time is reasonable for them, for say a meeting.

It also makes it easier to talk to others, if they say "6pm" you think "dinner time" or "just off work" without having to know the location of the person, at the time they're talking about, which may not even be where they are.

ganonm2• 8 years ago

Surely people would just start using some sort of utility that tells them 'people in X are usually awake between these hours'. It replaces an existing problem with a slightly different problem but the net gain is you remove all the annoying edge cases people currently have to deal with when converting between time zones. For example, no longer being confused about how long your flight lasts that traverses time zones.

peterlk• 8 years ago

Here is the standard answer to your question: https://qntm.org/abolish

The tldr; is that humans still operate more or less on the cycle of the sun

InclinedPlane6• 8 years ago

You still have to maintain all of the same information. Keeping track of the local solar time for cities, countries, and regions. Also, consider what it would be like to travel to other time zones. Not only do you have to learn of the UTC offset for the local region in terms of the time of day, but you have to keep remembering it constantly for everything you do throughout the day.

So now, if you're living on the East Coast and you want to get up at 8am local time you need to set your alarm to 12pm UTC instead. But when you travel to Hawaii you need to set your alarm to 6pm UTC. And now every single one of your waking days is distributed across two days with the day change happening at local 2pm in the afternoon. Your work week is Monday through Saturday, your weekend is Saturday through Monday.

I do not understand why anyone ever thinks this insanity sounds like a good idea.

Symbiote2• 8 years ago

Can't we keep the link with solar noon?

Morocco should be on UTC, most of the cities fit neatly in that timezone. They could have made this decision on Monday

kmm• 8 years ago

I'm curious to know, what is the point of linking to solar time? What advantage is there to the Sun reaching its highest point at 12 'o clock?

Most people are awake for about 6 hours before noon, and about 10 hours after. Most social events also happen after the work day. So our day is already shifted from what would logically follow from our clock. Being on +2 already feels like a compromise between the two.

I'd love it if getting up at 4am and going to bed at 8pm was the norm, and solar noon was the exact midpoint of the day, but as I am not a recluse I cannot start that trend, and therefore shifting the timezones seems more reasonable.

zzo38computer4• 8 years ago

One advantage of solar noon is use of sundials.

cmroanirgo• 8 years ago

As I presume you know, Solar noon represents the highest point of the Sun in the day. It seems fitting that the 'work hours' should be 4 hrs either side of that (8am-4pm).

Being a 'sunlover' I'm regularly up before dawn so that I can catch the first rays of Sun as it crosses the horizon. To me it's the most beautiful part of the day. Unfortunately, we have semi-arbitrarily defined 'zones' that fluctuate 1hr because of the propagandist notion that extra daylight at the end of the day means more people will be outside enjoying the Sun. This DST causes my work day to suddenly shift so that I'm forced to go to work earlier than normal, & I miss a lot of sunrises as a result.

I like this idea of solar noon for times... Especially for overseas communications too... because we'd just need to know the longitude of the person to know their exact time. (Currently, I'm forced to use timeanddate.com to work out relative overseas times).

Where I am, the state to the North of me doesn't follow DST (Qld), whereas mine does (nsw) and it creates havoc around the beginning/end of DST.

So, at least for me, there are three reasons to use solar noon based time rather than the current system. I'm sure I could come up with more.

That said, I go to bed early too, and acknowledge that isn't the way most people live.

eridius• 8 years ago

I don't know a single person that is awake at 6am. Where does this "most people" claim come from?

eloisant3• 8 years ago

That's how it works in Japan, and having lived there I don't think it's optimal.

You get 4:30am to 7pm in summer, and 8am to 6:30am to 4:30pm in winter. For most people, noon is not in the middle of the day (when they're waked up).

aritraghosh007• 8 years ago

And here we are still putting this to vote in California https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_7,_Permanent_...

masonic3• 8 years ago

It's silly to worry about the 1949 law now, given that we've been violating it for decades.

watersb• 8 years ago

My old iPad 4 (iOS 10.3.3) just asked for a reboot in order to apply timezone changes.

rossdavidh3• 8 years ago

The assertion that the countries which do not use DST are "mostly in Africa and Asia" is an odd way to put it. The countries that DO use DST are more of the exception now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#/media/Fi...

alexdumitru5• 8 years ago

Almost all of Europe will abolish DST this year.

gsich3• 8 years ago

Doubt. It will probably happen, but not that fast.

isostatic4• 8 years ago

Very unlikely. Next year perhaps, seems a fairly popular proposal.

bonzini• 8 years ago

Of course, DST doesn't make sense outside a relatively small range of latitudes (too close to the equator and all days are 12 hours anyway; too far and summer evenings last until 9pm-10pm even with solar time).

In Italy, for example, having DST means you avoid dawn at 4am in the summer (getting nice longer evenings in exchange) _and_ dawn at 8.30am in the winter.

pmarreck2• 8 years ago

PROGRAMMERS:

We have timezone homework to do again :/

Freak_NL2• 8 years ago

No you don't. Only the maintainer of tzdata. All we have to do is make sure we use an up-to-date version of tzdata, which all modern operating systems do automatically (although probably not quite before tomorrow).

pmarreck2• 8 years ago

I know, but you ruined my joke.

andorov• 8 years ago

Reminds me of Computerphile's The Problem with Time & Timezones - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY

failrate• 8 years ago

I love Morocco that much more.

notjustanymike• 8 years ago

Moroccan web developers right now: AAaAAAAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaaaAAAAAaaaAAaaAAAaAAAhhhHHHHHHH!!!!!

SOLAR_FIELDS• 8 years ago

The developers I least envy are any that are tasked with maintaining a library that has anything to do with dates and time.

eeZah7Ux• 8 years ago

This is not reddit.

noobermin• 8 years ago

Right now, this DST discussion will hang low on the front page, but a few months from now when we reverse it, you can bet that once again a discussion about DST will be the top story for at least a day and linger in our minds for two weeks until we promptly forget it.

petre• 8 years ago

Good. They had 4 yearly DST changes previously, two during summer/winter and two during Ramadan. Must be exhausting. Algeria dropped DST since 1980.

Raed667• 8 years ago

I remember when Tunisia went off DST in 2008, phones struggled for a few years after.

beeforpork• 8 years ago

Good, please everyone do this, time, date, and life are chaotic enough without DST.

And now drop the leap second crap and insert a leap hour every 7200 years, OK?

gstaro• 8 years ago

Is there a service where you can pull constantly updated info about time zones etc? Like a library?

crtasm• 8 years ago

I believe you want https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database or something that uses it as a source.

zouhair2• 8 years ago

Well it didn't live long. We were always at GMT and now ten years later of ever using DST we are stuck with it. Not complaining. I hate having to fix the microwave clock.

Morocco abruptly drops clock change

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