24hr time is simply superior in every way. I don’t get why more people dont swap it.
I changed mine on a whim years ago and never looked back.Like the old truth “America does everything the wrong way”. 24h is superior, metric is superior, dd.mm.yyyy format is superior, etc…
A4 is superior too.
(Yes US doesn’t use A4 paper.)
The superiority of ISO paper sizes isn’t obvious at all if you don’t know how US paper is different. Seems like different countries just use different sizes. But as anyone accustomed to using A- or B-series papers knows, A4 is made of exactly 2 A5s, and the pattern holds up to A10 and down to A0, whereas the US paper sizes are completely unrelated to each other.
So good!
dd.mm.yyyy
I believe in ISO 8601 supremacy
(I’m not saying its not better than American one thougn)
I have for years named files that have a chronological component ymd , and if hours are relevant, hm. A few ymdhm.
Makes a lot of sense when ordering directories.
Edit: and the file name after that. Wouldn’t be useful without descriptive text.
2026-04-13 rule
This is the way.
One of my favourite examples of this is road sign lettering.
Instead of just using the same style as Europe.
They created their own, which caused its own problems.
Then created a replacement, which didn’t help.
too lazy to learn.
Large parts of the world use 24h time regularly. Only Americans, as far as I know, really struggle with 24h time, roundabouts, and bidets as concepts.
American here. I use 24h time, vastly favor roundabouts over traffic lights, and I would rather poop at home with my bidet attachment than get paid to poop at work. I’m not exactly your average American, but there are probably millions of us. The world mostly hears the loud dipshits because they are loud and their thoughts are dipshit enough that people who hear them feel the need to tell somebody about what a stupid dipshit take they heard from some loud dipshit.
Yeah, I’m also an American. Those are examples from personal experience.
When I was growing up the dipshit town where my family lived was thinking about installing a roundabout instead of the series of 4 lights in front of the Walmart. The level of genuine panic it caused was insane. Huge groups at city council meetings with signs worried about car insurance rates going up because of “all the accidents it will cause!” Needless to say, it didn’t happen. Meanwhile, roundabouts work just fine for the rest of Earth and I’ve only ever seen one accident in one, due to construction.
Why on earth would anyone be afraid of roundabouts? Like they aren’t even more complicated than traffic lights to understand.
Fear of change and hate of “The Other.” Town full of the most hate-filled Boomers I’ve ever seen.
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Roundabouts should decrease premiums, as they essentially eliminate Tbone collisions
Won’t somebody think of insurance companies!?
This is poetic
did someone mention dipshittery? i have a card in case you need me
In Europe, all our roundabouts have bidets installed. This is to repel all the dipshits.
There are countries in Europe that don’t use bidets. Not even a handheld bidet shower. In those countries they don’t even wash their ass or cooch the old school way unless they are from a migrant family.
hey we’re getting better at roundabouts
no really they are installing them at a frightening pace and if you’re under 60 you’ve figured them out, especially the toilet roundabouts what flush you out. over that… well… i’m not going to talk about my MIL i’m trying to wind down not get angryMy wife is from Colombia and not used to the 24 hour system.
Technically she’s still American. Just South American.
i just got in an argument with all of lemmy not half an hour ago in my head and earlier than that in reality that no one else gets to claim american because i don’t know. i was on your side on this argument.
Maybe because of the caveat “technically” giving readers easy distinction between geographic American and the American nation? Or maybe just the bad luck of hitting the hivemind wrong.
Does she refer to it as “hora militar” though?
No. She just says “in French” for the 24 hour system, and “in Spanish” for the 12 hour system, since that’s where she noticed the difference in our context.
Either using both or mostly issuing 24h is a thing in the Eastern hemisphere, so Europe, Africa, and Asia. It’s not universally applied, but there’s lots of places that use it on things like telling you when a TV show will be on, for example.
Par example
Bidets are slowly growing in popularity in the USA. But only for home installation, I haven’t seen them in public restrooms yet.
Only muricans think 24h clock = military time 😂
Everything is military/war oriented. Remember the “war on drugs”? They can’t comprehend the world except from a perspective of opposition and control. 🤷🥲
I hate when people associate the two. I got used to it because I was in civil aviation, and I kept using it because it’s better.
Well it kinda is 'cos jar heads can’t say 12:00, they say 1200, a literal twelve-hundred. Only military does that.
I do it because then I don’t put my calendar appointments in at oh, 3:00 AM.
15:00 is SOOOOOO much better for adhd me.
Also: it makes total sense! 24 hours, 24 separate numbers. It’s the most logical conclusion.
Also fewer wasted pixels on the am/pm text. 24h is just objectively superior in every way.
In the UK we all (generally) read 24 hour but speak in 12 hour. So we see 15:00 but say 3. Only military peeps talk on 24, and it can sound weird, but people can easily understand them as long as they can parse the who “-hundred” thing (15:00 being fifteen-hundred)
In Denmark it’s always written in 24hr, but I’d say it’s 50/50 whether we say 3 or 15 for 15:00.
I guess saying 3 is more casual. But we never use “hundred”. 15:30 would just be fifteen-thirty.
Dutchie here, same for me. In English it’s easy to say 3pm or 9pm but in Dutch that would be 3 uur 's middags (in the afternoon) or 9 uur 's avonds (in the evening) so 15 uur and 21 uur is shorter to say. However, when it’s “am” I always say 's nachts (at night) or 's ochtends (in the morning) to avoid confusion. But all digital clocks in NL are on 24h. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone with a 12h notation on their phone or anything else. It’s such a standard, I don’t even think my oven and microwave have a 12h notation option.
I think it’s just a case of uneducated ignorant Americans stuck in the past, while also having no clue there exists a rest of the world where people are not weird. Like with their imperial system and IALA buoys system (for the entire American continents by the way).
I think most of Europe uses 24h in writing but 12h when speaking.
I think most of
Europethe world uses 24h in writing but 12h when speaking.Actually the French use 24h and speak 24h.
Leftovers of the military mindset from Napoleon, I’m sure of it!
Nah 24h time was introduced by the US in Europe during WW2.
It is similar in Germany. Often with the word Uhr (like o’clock in english) added.
“3 Uhr” or “15 Uhr 30”
Yep, though we also have “Klokken halv 4” which is especially confusing for foreigners
I don’t speak the language, but this looks like it would literally translate to something like “half of the fourth hour” which in English we might say as “half past three”. Kind of interesting that we might say “quarter to four” to mean 3:45, but never “half til four” to mean 3:30.
Yup, it is just half an hour before, very commonly used here. There’s some other English language (Australian?) where it means the opposite - totally not confusing.
We also use quarter to/quarter past as well of course
Some people from eastern parts of germany go with stuff like “Dreiviertel 3” - three-quarters 3 - 14:45 Uhr.
A good way of keeping the time-information secret, I am certainly too slow to translate that.
Same thing in Argentina. As usual, USA are the weird ones xD
Bulgarian here, same story. 24 hour removes the ambiguity in written form without the need for a suffix, 12 hour is shorter in speech and 99% of the time it doesn’t need specifying because the AM/PM is evident from the context.
Hard mode: set time zone to UTC (or Reykjavik; it’s the same) and force yourself to add/subtract offset hours every time you want to know local time. Also, this forces you to track when exactly daylight saving time starts and stops.
Benefit: you know when space probe stuff happens because they’re almost always timestamped UTC. Also, playing Eve Online becomes slightly easier.
I still can’t understand that the one thing the entire world agreed upon is DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME. I mean, there was someone or a group of people, with the skills to convince ever country on their point of view and they spend their expertise on this? Not on world peace or human rights or anything that would lift our species up? Seriously, why?
Bahh… The full day is 2π.
- 12:00 is π
- 15:00 is 3/2π And so on… Sane people use 2π = 𝜏 instead.
Actually a day is slightly longer than 2π since our orbit shifts the point of the circle that faces the sun each revolution.
Absolutely… Similar argument holds for the year btw. In that case it is better to treat a “day” or “year” as an artificial time constant and define them as 2π while skipping all the astronomical context. Otherwise you are free to write UT1D in a 2π notation also.
I remember when I was a kid who joined a mostly American guild with Discord server in Warframe.
I was so confused when I wrote the time in 24h and the guy I was chatting with seemed genuinely uncomfortable with me writing in military jargon.
(He also believed in ghosts and I had trouble explaining the difference between additive and multiplicative multipliers to him)
Warframe
uncomfortable with me writing in military jargon
The irony didn’t occur to me, I got a chuckle out of this.
But to play devil’s advocate for him, the game’s outlandishly sci-fi with “space ninjas”, and the actual players typically don’t chat like gun nuts.
Only in America do they judge people for using the 24hr clock. Most of the rest of the world uses it. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/what-countries-use-24-hour-time
As an American who uses military time on everything, nobody has ever judged me for it. I am not military either.
Looking at how the clock in Windows defaults based on region, it seems to be mostly the Whiter of the former British colonies plus a few South American countries that use 12h (for computing, at least). The rest of the world are all 24h.
There are several industries that run on 24 hour time outside of the military. Ocean shipping, aviation, and medical care off the top of my head. Want to throw a real wrench in the works? Start figuring Zulu time, especially when time changes happen at different times of the year in different countries or US states that don’t change at all.
Anyway, 24 hour time is so much easier. No making mistakes forgetting to select AM/PM when setting an alarm or reminder, for instance. Even converting it to 12 hour time takes no thought at all of you use it for a while.
Fuck people who work in logistics right?
Logistics is the real plebian class no matter the era
Move my shit pleb!
/uj it’s actually really important. In the military it takes on average 9 supporting soldiers to every 1 infantry man the majority of which were responsible for logistics. It’s fucked how the system financially rapes the actual workers, but it is a very lucrative industry.
/rj and don’t break anything! Lol.
So, in other words…
MOVE THAT SHIT FASTER PLEB!!
Listen, it’s easier, especially when you work with scientific or industrial systems
There are two comments here:
- I can count to 24
- I get confused by 12PM
The real crime is dividing the day into 24h, 60m per hour, 60s per min.
A LOT of western measurement was base 12, the only reason people are so used to base 10 is because that’s how many fingers most people have. Base 12 is really useful however, it is uniquely divisible and 60 as 5*12 is even more so.
I don’t know why western, cause we got that from the Babylonians
Maybe it’s because of my understanding of history but I’d consider Iraq to be Western. It was more or less linked in with Europe going back to the bronze age much like how North Africa was. Frankly speaking the only reason it is usually separated is because of the great Schism and then the crusades which caused much of Europe to consider it as other.
That’s fair
I get confused by 12PM
Everyone gets confused by that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-hour_clock#Confusion_at_noon_and_midnight
I just don’t understand what pm and am mean:(
I can never get 12PM and 12AM right.
That’s because it it’s defined in a way that is linguistically correct, but utterly insane for regular use.
After morning and previous morning
Past meridian and almost meridian?
Post meridiem and ante meridiem
I had to scroll way too far for an actually correct answer.
After morning, Past midday, or is it the other way around? 😅
For me it’s After Midnight and Pefore Midnight. 😄 I have no idea which one is 12PM and which one is 12AM, though…
Post meridian and ante meridian.
