https://xkcd.com/2846

Alt text:

I average out the spring and fall changes and just set my clocks 39 minutes ahead year-round.

  • BOMBS@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Wait a minute. I’m taking this four steps further for the benefit of all of humanity. Here we go.

    One, we need to convert over to 24-hour time. No more of this ridiculous AM/PM confusing crap that makes calculating times confusing. What time is it? It’s 9. AM or PM? None of that. It’s 9. What time is it 8 hours after 9? It’s 9+8= 17. It’s 17. Not 5p. What the hell. Why did anyone even ever agree to this AM/PM garbage?

    Two, we need to end time zones. They are ridiculous. What’s the point?? We could all work on GMT. Imagine, the entire world on one date. A whole worldwide party to celebrate the new year at the same time. International flight scheduling would be soooo intuitive. Your flight time is the arrival time minus the departure time without having to pull out a timezone map and consider daylights-savings to calculate it. What time is it on the International Space Station? The exact same time it is for the rest of humanity. Oh, but then half the world will be awake at night. Nope! They would just adjust their working/wake hours. Instead of the Eastern USA being open from 0900-1700, they would be open from 0400-1300. BTW, calculating that time difference was easy since it was on 24-hour time.

    Three, we need to change over to the Julian calendar. What the hell are months even?? They don’t serve any purpose other than to sell calendars, maintain the legacy of ancient emperors that dissolved democracies, and gaslight us by telling us that Sept, Oct, Nov, and Dec mean 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th. Get out of here with that crap. We’re not buying it. Also, you know who else doesn’t use 12-hour time and months?? The US military. They use GMT and Julian calendars for operational matters. Why? Because it makes sense for a global system to use the same thing everywhere!!

    Fourth and lastly, we need to switch the year count to the Human Era. Stop with this whole year based on Jesus’ supposed birth or death**. Do we even know if it’s based on his birth or death? It doesn’t matter. Oh, but historians use Before Common Era and Common Era. Okay…and who’s life happens to line up perfectly with the split? That’s like saying that the American Civil Rights movement ended racism in the country, yet there’s still racial segregation and oppression. This is ridiculous. Civilization is letting the life of one person decide when it started?! What about everyone that lived before Jesus? Abroham? Cleopatra? Mark Antony (the full Roman, not the Romantic Puerto Rican)? the Buddha Llama? Sohcrateez? Confusion? Ea-nāṣir?! The correct year is when human civilization started. We are currently in the year 12,023 of the Human Era.

    That’s it! We’ve had enough of this oppression propagated by Big Time, including Rolex, Casio, Fossil, and grandfather. This movement starts right here👇, right now👇! One☝🏿humanity. One☝🏾period in the day inconsiderate of the meridian. One☝🏽variable for the date in a year. One☝🏼love. One☝🏻time.

    Edit: Right now at the time of this edit, it is 5:00 pm on October 25, 2023 EST (daylights savings time), or better yet, 12023-298-2100 (year-date-time). 31 characters (excluding that it’s daylights savings time!) vs. 14. Look at how simple 😮

    We are all one system of humanity functioning on the same time, regardless of what anyone says. Right now is right now, no matter what we call it. It’s time we all progress to a better future at/on the same time.

    • usualsuspect191@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      They would just adjust their working/wake hours. Instead of the Eastern USA being open from 0900-1700, they would be open from 0400-1300.

      Isn’t that just time zones again?

      • Player2@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        No because if you’re talking to someone on the other side of the planet (thanks internet), you can schedule some sort of event with them without having to look up the time difference before hand

        • limelight79@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Yeah but you need to know when they’d be sleeping, for example, so you still need to figure something out related to time differences.

          • blackbrook@mander.xyz
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            1 year ago

            You both just have present your working or availability hours beforehand. Honestly this works better for me than someone assuming I’m available for an 8am meeting. I live on the US east coast, but my sleeping schedule is more west coast.

      • BOMBS@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Kind of, but not exactly. Those are the hours their businesses are open. However, this takes one variable out of the formula, which is calculating the time difference. Rather than having to know the time difference and business hours, you’d only have to know the business hours. Also, it would be even easier if you just shared your availability, which is what matters anyway, but you don’t have to calculate the time difference. There’s only one variable to communicate, which is the universal time they would be available. It’s super simple.

    • nfh@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Julian calendar? No that’s silly. New calendar, 13 months, each is 28 days. You get one intercalary day for New Year’s, and a bonus one following our existing leap year schedule

      • psud@aussie.zone
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        1 year ago

        The symmetry calendars are better. They don’t break the 7 day week cycle, they instead have a 52 week common year, a 53 week leap year, and a complex leap year formula

        I would expect the leap week to be part of the end of year holiday

      • BOMBS@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        You’re always calling me out on my bullshit. I’m sick of this crap! 😋

    • blackbrook@mander.xyz
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      1 year ago

      Where did you get the idea that the Julian calendar doesn’t have months? The Gregorian calendar we use now made a tiny tweak to it to reduce drift, but is nearly the same.

      • BOMBS@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I don’t remember specifically where I got the idea, but when I was in the military, we used it for operations and never used the month. We would solely state the day of the year. If that has another name, then that’s what I’m talking about. A yearly calendar where the date is the day of the year in sequential order without months.

    • daltotron@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I kind of half-heartedly agree with most of this, but the human era one is kind of stupid. I don’t really care about jesus’s birth or death or whatever, I just have no reason to add an extra 1 to the date for the next 10,000 years until I switch it to a 2. Mostly because I’ll be dead, but also because such a point would be so far in the future that I don’t know that any of this argument will be relevant at all.

      Edit: also, you forgot the biggest one, which kind of goes along with months but not really: seasons. Lots of places don’t have four distinct seasons, they just have a wet season and a dry season, or a dry kind of summer and then a wet winter and then a dry winter, or whatever, which influences local ecology a lot. Moulding these around to roughly fit whatever any individual location’s season is, is kind of stupid. It’s better just to say what the actual season is, it’s less confusing, Everyone knows what everyone else means, it’s more specific. People have been tricked into thinking that the four seasons are a universal thing, they’re not, that’s false.

      • thedarkfly@feddit.nl
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        1 year ago

        The same can be said about the thousands in the current year. We’ll basically wait 1000 years just to change the 2 into a 3.

    • TheGreenGolem@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I’m SO glad that in my country the 24H format is the de facto standard! There are very few things I like in this shithole, but the ISO-8601 dates and the 24H time format is definitely one of them.

    • BastingChemina@slrpnk.net
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      1 year ago

      You forgot decimal time!

      We should stop this nonsense of having 24 hours a day, 60 minutes per hours, 60 seconds per minutes, 1000 ms per seconds.

      Instead we switch to switch to decimal time: 10 hours a day, 100 minutes per hours and 100 second per minutes.

    • worldsayshi@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I like how your suggestions successively became more radical.

      But, Julian calendar? Still a rookie I see.

      The calendar year has 13 months with 28 days each, divided into exactly 4 weeks (13 × 28 = 364). An extra day added as a holiday at the end of the year (after December 28, i.e. equal December 31 Gregorian), sometimes called “Year Day”, does not belong to any week and brings the total to 365 days.

      I suspect about 1% of the world cares enough to even have this discussion though.

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      we need to change over to the Julian calendar

      That’s where the names of the months of the Gregorian calendar (which is what we’re using) come from, the Julian calender got them from the old Roman calendar (which was inaccurate as fuck). The main relevant change in the Gregorian reform is the spacing of leap years, making it drift less than the Julian one. It’s still drifting a bit and a fix was proposed back in the 19th century but never adopted. We’ll probably revisit the topic in the decade before the year 4000 where it’s actually going to matter.

      If you want a sane calendar try the Discordian one. Though arguably St. Tib’s day shouldn’t be right in the middle of a season. I’d suggest considering it the 0th day of Chaos, giving an additional hangover day for New Year’s every once in a while, also, set the St. Tib’s day years to the same stuff as the aforementioned reformed Gregorian, whith an asterisks saying “change as needed once the earth starts falling into the sun for real”. The starting year (1 YOLD is 1166 BC) is fine because it’s completely random.

      • BOMBS@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Me texting my friends…

        Me: What are you doing for Conflufux?

        Friend: What is that?

        Me: Bro, Confusion 50

        Friend: I don’t know what you’re talking about.

        Me: Typical

      • PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I propose everything be based on factors of 10 - 10 hours per day, 100 or 1000 days per year, etc. None of this ‘basing time and calendar off of easily and widely recognizable natural phenomenon!’

    • BlanketsWithSmallpox@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I hope you’ve gotten your Kurzgesagt calendar like I have!

      Killing DST and establishing metric in the USA is the one selfish thing I’d like to see Biden do before leaving office permanently.

    • Sombyr@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      I support a move to 24 hour time. I’m sick of waking up from a nap checking the clock to see if I overslept, and it’s like “It’s 5.” 5 what? Did I sleep 1 hour or 13?

      Can’t check the sun. I live in the north. The sun lies.

      • WhiteHawk@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Why don’t you just set your clock to 24h? I’ve never had a digital clock without that option

        • Sombyr@lemmy.one
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          1 year ago

          Some of my clocks have the option, some don’t. I find it inconvenient to have different clocks set to different things making my brain have to mentally convert between eachother. Not to mention having to mentally convert the time every time I need to give a time to somebody else. It’d just be easier if the whole world was on 24 hour by default.

          • WhiteHawk@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            In most of the world, 24h is the default. Though being able to convert is still necessary, since analog clocks still exist. It really isn’t too difficult to get used to.

    • kase@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I like it! Meanwhile, the US still hasn’t managed to convert to the metric system. Imagine the confusion if the rest of the world decided to adopt this time system and we didn’t. Oh god

      • PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        The US converted the only part of its economy and culture that matters to metric, and that’s it’s military!

        • Narrrz@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          in all seriousness, I’m a big fan of metric time. change it so there are 100,000 seconds in a day (currently the figure is 86400) - the duration of a second would only be 864/1000 of present. a minute can be 100 seconds, which would be equivalent to 86.4 seconds now, and there could be 50 minutes in an hour (4320 current seconds, compared to 3600, or 72 minutes) and 20 hours in a day.

          it would be a bit of a shift, but I don’t think it would need impossible, and just think of the advantages.

          no, really, please think of some advantages. I’m drawing a blank.

          • SnipingNinja@slrpnk.net
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            1 year ago

            I apologise as I too am drawing a blank, but apparently it’ll be more conducive to time zone removal according to ChatGPT.

            Also metric time gives 10 hours of 100 minutes each in a day, not 20 hours of 50 minutes.

            • Narrrz@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              that’s another option, but we’re used to having 12-16 hours of daylight, having that fall to 5-6 would be a much bigger shock than 10-12.

              not to mention having every hour last the equivalent of 144 current minutes would make the hours really drag on.

              • SnipingNinja@slrpnk.net
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                1 year ago

                Yeah, but so will the ordinal date calendar with no months, and the shorter seconds but longer minutes. I don’t think the discomfort is an argument that’s entirely valid here, the transition of course shouldn’t be abrupt but the end goal should be the ideal version, that we should aim for and not the midway steps.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      Right now at the time of this edit, it is 5:00 pm on October 25, 2023 EST (daylights savings time), or better yet, 12023-298-2100

      I support going over to stardates. Anyway we’ll need to do this once we leave Earth so we might as well get used to it now.

    • The Octonaut@mander.xyz
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      1 year ago

      The most amount of effort for the least return of actually helping human beings.

      And that’s just your post itself, so far.

      Can I ask what you think the Julian calendar is?

    • Lime66@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      if you look at the julian calendar what will you see? months. I don’t think you know enough about the julian calendar to say that we should switch to it

    • Turun@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      I’m with you on most things.

      Two counter points though

      • a normal date is already 14 characters: 2023-10-25-2100

      • while I dislike the religious connection of the year numbering, I actually don’t care about it. And adding ten thousand to it doesn’t change anything. It’s like putting a spoiler on a slow car and then pretending it’s better now. No it isn’t you are just expressing your desire for something better in a shitty way that is actually worse. Seriously, adding a 1 to the year is a useless change.
        If you desperately want to change year zero, there apparently exists the Julian period and Julian day number:

      The Julian day number (JDN) is the integer assigned to a whole solar day in the Julian day count starting from noon Universal Time, with Julian day number 0 assigned to the day starting at noon on Monday, January 1, 4713 BC, proleptic Julian calendar (November 24, 4714 BC, in the proleptic Gregorian calendar), a date at which three multi-year cycles started (which are: Indiction, Solar, and Lunar cycles) and which preceded any dates in recorded history. For example, the Julian day number for the day starting at 12:00 UT (noon) on January 1, 2000, was 2451545.

        • SpacePirate@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Op forgot a few characters to ensure proper iso date and time format:

          20231025T210000Z

        • Turun@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          I’m in favor of global UTC as well, so the same as your example date.

          The point was more in comparison to the 31 character claim, which is not a fair comparison when you spell out the name of the month.

    • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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      What the hell are months even?? They don’t serve any purpose other than

      They used to be used to note the change of the weather from one season to another, in a general range (not a literal single solstice date) sort of way.

      However it does seem like the seasons are slipping in comparison to the calendar, Summer starting later and ending later, etc.

    • Takumidesh@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      International travel would be way more confusing.

      If I land somewhere at 9am local time I know that the bank will be open when I land and it will be day time.

      If everyone is on the same time and I travel somewhere it will be a complete surprise (or I will have to figure it out before hand) whether or not it will be the middle of the night or the middle of the day.

      • PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        But who cares? Everything would be open 8am-5pm GMT regardless if it’s sunny or dark outside. Go visit the Grand Canyon at midnight, it’s the same as at sunrise or at noon!

        • Takumidesh@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          No it wouldn’t, generally it’s healthier for humans to sleep at night, so businesses are going to trend towards operating during sunlight hours.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I kept trying to disagree but I couldn’t. It’ll suck but it’ll be worth it. We should metricate the English speaking world while we do it. And no the uk has not metricated, they just pretend to have

    • Bgugi@lemmy.world
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      One☝🏿humanity. One☝🏾period in the day inconsiderate of the meridian. One☝🏽variable for the date in a year. One☝🏼love. One☝🏻time.

      Children will be blessed for

      Killing Of Educated Adults

      Who Ignore 4 Simultaneous

      Days Same Earth Rotation.

      Practicing Evil ONEness -

      Upon Earth Of Quadrants.

      Evil Adult Crime VS Youth.

      Supports Lie Of Integration.

      1 Educated Are Most Dumb.

      Not 1 Human Except Dead 1.

      Man Is Paired, 2 Half 4 Self.

    • IndigoGollum@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’ve been using 24 hour UTC for a few days and one big problem I’ve noticed is days of ðe week. Where I live, days end in ðe afternoon (around 1800 local time) so I get confused about what day of ðe week it is in ðe evening.

    • blady_blah@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s all well and good, but can you add to the list the US just fucking changing to SI units instead of the stupid ass English system? (Since we’re on the topic of the things that will never happen.)

    • PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I’d go farther and make sure everyone works 365 days a year, 0800-0500 GMT daily. No exceptions!!!