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xkcd #2846: Daylight Saving Choice
(imgs.xkcd.com)
Alt text:
I average out the spring and fall changes and just set my clocks 39 minutes ahead year-round.
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.
Isn't that just time zones again?
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
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.
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.
Ok, but businesses run about 8 to 17 local no matter where you are in the world, that's much easier to figure out with time zones than having to check the business's schedule every time you need to contact one.
I never understand the anti timezone argument... Right now I know that across the world they'll be working somewhere between 8h and 17h local like anywhere else in the world, so I do some quick math and I know when that is in relation to me. Without time zones I need to be actively informed at what time someone across the world is working in order to know when I can contact them...
But you are making assumptions which are not really true anywhere. Working hours I Spain and Germany are already white different. Main reason is of course that they share the same time zone by law, but are not geographically in the same time zone. But there are some additional differences in culture which extend this effect.
That information won't be lost, though. It just would be expressed differently. They are no longer in a +8 hour time zone, which given your own location in a +1 hour zone would lead to a most likely open time of 8 - 8 + 1 = 1 til 17 - 8 + 1 = 10 your time, but in an area where opening hours are most likely between 0100 and 1000.
There is still a lookup, but no longer a lookup of time difference of the area, but a lookup of usual business hours in the area.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
The Julian calendar is the one that has no special rule for leap years. It is currently October the 12th in the Julian calendar.
The calendar that is used all around the world is the Gregorian calendar.
What you mean is called the ordinal date (at least by Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_calendar, see the disambiguation note at the top)
I think you’re talking about this, which the article says used to called Julian date
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_date
Yeah that part didn't make sense... If they proposed a 13 months, 28 days/month calendar or one without months then ok, but the Julian calendar is just the Gregorian calendar shifted 13 days...
Fine. What's the term for a calendar that labels every day of the year in sequential order without using any other divisions like months?
GMT is a time zone! UTC.
You're always calling me out on my bullshit. I'm sick of this crap! 😋
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.
I like how your suggestions successively became more radical.
But, Julian calendar? Still a rookie I see.
I suspect about 1% of the world cares enough to even have this discussion though.
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.
12 divides nicer and evener than 10. If only evolution had given us two extra fingers we'd use base twelve numbers and everything would be better.
Or just switch to using base 12
Yes! All this plus International Fixed Calendar and then all date issues will be solved forever!
Or until we start going to space for real
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.
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
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.
The human era calendar is still based on the supposed birth of Jesus though, it just adds 10k to the number.
According to the video I linked, it's not though. It's based on an estimate of the Agricultural Revolution. I think keeping it attached to the year 2023 is a just nice compromise that allows us to keep some fluidity between our previous year-system and Christians that would be upset. Everyone wins and we could move forward from this outdated system.
That's still based on Jesus's birth year, it's not the same as saying something like "We're trying to standardize, we know the agricultural revolution happened about 12k years ago, let's go back 12k years from the biggest standardization event in human history, i.e. the metre convention, that means current year is 12148."
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.
Why don't you just set your clock to 24h? I've never had a digital clock without that option
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.
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
I am 1010% on board with this and will be using no other system going forward
Agree but I sheepishly like getting lost in the Gregorian calendar for the simple fact that the Julian makes it all too evident how quickly life is passing me by and it makes me anxious as hell.
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
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:
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?