As someone who grew up with a 24-hour clock, I can deal with 12 hours. Usually there’s no confusion if your store opens at 7am or 7pm. But 12:30PM being a valid time and meaning ‘00:30 on the next day’ fucks me up every time.
12:30 AM is 00:30 though?
They shouldn’t even have 12 on the clock, it should be 0 because the 12 hour clock is modulo 12.
Case and point as to why it’s confusing lmao
“case in point” although "case and point " is arguably an eggcorn
Damn, just learned I’ve been using that phrase wrong my whole life
I appreciate that you didn’t get mad about it. Of course it doesn’t matter here, but I point these things out in case people need to use them correctly in a serious situation.
He did say it always fucks him up :D
12:30PM means 30 minutes after 12-noon.
Anyone saying that and meaning the middle of the night is just wrong, and if that’s a genuine thing people do it would drive me quite mad.
30 minutes after midnight is 12:30AM
Perfectly illustrates how it doesn’t make sense.
I can get behind
- 11.30pm
- 12.30pm
- 1.30am
Or
- 11.30pm
- 0.30am
- 1.30am
But
- 11.30pm
- 12.30am
- 1.30am
just doesn’t make sense.
i would like to suggest, instead of 1230pm and 1230am we do 1230m and 1230n. one for midnight and one for noon. or one for night and one for munchies. i forget.
You start counting the hours to the next noon at midnight, duh. That’s why it’s ante-meridian, and the beginning of a new day. If you want to go around calling it 00:30, most people would understand, even in America.
Did you mix up the first and third place? Because if 12:00 is “m”, it makes more sense for 12:30am to be night.
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As I said, it always fucks me up. The AM/PM indicator wraps at a different hour than the hours. Aaargh!
Literally this. I was never in the military, and I’m glad they literally can’t draft me unless they lower a lot of requirements really fast. But 24-hour time is just so much more sensible. There’s no “AM or PM?” follow-up question, no guesswork. It just makes sense.
If they made metric time, I’d adopt that shit in a heartbeat.
the standard time that almost everyone uses is metric, i.e. is part of the metric system, its units are SI units. there was a system of decimal time, if that’s what you mean, developed in France during the revolution, where a day is 10 hours, each 100 minutes, each 100 seconds
so a decimal hour is 2.4 standard hours
a decimal minute is 1.44 standard minutes
a decimal second is 0.864 standard secondsI think it’s cheating to call it metric if it’s not decimal. Even some of the oldest analog clocks had 24-hour faces, they were just a bitch to read in a watch-size. You still have to do stupid math to figure out duration past the 12 or 24, and even with the 60 minutes/1 hour. Nothing metric or superior about it.
The French tried metric time. It was pretty quickly abandoned.
how heartbeat? I have a metric calendar that only one other person likes. 13 months of 4 weeks of 7 days, with one day leftover for celebrating my birthday (because i decided we’re doing the calendar, the day off is my birthday suck it trebek)
This teaches you the value of terms like “half past noon“ and “quarter to midnight“
In Europe they say “point five past noon” and “point two five to midnight”
Norwegian here. I don’t recognize this. Where in europe do they say it like that? We mostly use the 12 hour system to talk about time of day, but write in 24 hours. We don’t say am or pm though.
Is this a joke no one is getting or something?
is that what German humor is like?
In europe they say knock-knock-knock who’s there, not knock-knock whos there, for jokes.
that seems overly complicated
I guess you’re making a joke about .5 being half and .25 being quarter. We say half past 11 in the US too.
The real problem is languages that use “half 11” and it means 11:30 or 10:30 depending on where you are.
“Closes at 25:00” is funny too
But luckily unambiguous.
12:30 pm is half-past noon.
12:30 am is half past midnight, or as you would say 00:30
The m is “meridian” which is noon (sun straight up)
The a is ante/before and the p is post/after
In olden days it was easier to look up and set your clock at noon than midnight.
By the definition of post meridian, though, half past noon should be 0:30 pm.
We use the 12 at both ends because there it is sitting at the top of the clock
It doesn’t mean that.
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 angryBidets are slowly growing in popularity in the USA. But only for home installation, I haven’t seen them in public restrooms yet.
My 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
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.
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.
are Americans really confused with 15:30?
Only inasmuch as I have to count from 12 because I don’t have the built-in instinct for that time format.
If you see a two-digit number beginning with 1, drop the first number and subtract two from the second number. If your sum is negative, it’s that many hours before noon.
If your number begins with 2, do the same thing. If your number is negative, it’s that many hours before 10pm.
Anything to not subtract 12
I didn’t even know what that number says
Yeah lol, that’s way more mental gymnastics than just adding/subtracting 12. I dont even bother with the whole 12, I just add and subtract 2 and my mind kind of deals with the extra 10 hours I’m too lazy to deal with.
One time I was on shrooms in the PMs and it was really hard to figure out what the time was. The literal digits and the concept of time itself at some point.
Otherwise, never had an issue.
Also, is 24hour time not default on most phones? Or did I do that and forget about it at some point, and it’s only me, never paying attention to the time on other people’s phones
You’d get that instinct within at most a week though.
Nah, all you need is a little time to get used to it. It’s my default setting on most of my devices. Once you get used to it, it’s much easier to tell am vs pm at a glance, which is helpful when looking at timestamps (I work in IT, timestamps are important.)
I switched after being in a job where “meeting at 6” or “I’ll get in at 9” was 50/50 am or pm and I got sick of guessing and sometimes being 12 hours off.
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I’m regularly looking at log timestamps and I still need a very brief half second to think about the time lol
Shouldn’t the system be storing timestamps in UTC anyway, and then displaying them in whatever localization settings you have?
I meant more for my personalized reading through logs. Some of our systems do log in UTC without correction, and they’re sometimes annoying.
No, it’s just a familiarity thing and not even rare. It’s like switching between metric and imperial units, if you’re used to seeing something in one format it can be jarring to switch it in your head at a moments notice. A lot of people in the US use 24 hr time if they have a job relating to documentation or if their working hours can cause confusion.
For example, I have a client that has to document received material and they are open from 04:00 - 22:00. They use the 24 hr format because it is common to receive material at both 04:00 and 16:00 and having to make an extra column to type am or pm on their logs is stupid and is just another opportunity to make a mistake.
It’s really not a big deal to anyone, if you get a job that uses it then you switch your phone and within a week or two it’s second nature. Every blue moon someone will notice that all your clocks are set to a 24 hr clock and someone might ask why or what you do to need it, but that’s it.
t’s like switching between metric and imperial units,
I’d wager the imperial/metric change would be harder than the 12/24 change.
Probably so, but it’s still just immersion. If you work in Celsius every day for 2 weeks you’ll be able to switch Celsius without an issue.
Written as 1530, mostly only Americans who have been in the military and their friends will know what you mean.
15:30 they’ll know it’s a time.
And doctors, nurses, lab technicians, etc, plus anyone who can subtract twelve.
I grew up with a Betamax tape player under the family TV. It had a 24 hour clock and it was the timepiece in the house that was in the right spot to tell us all that it was bedtime. As a result I have an intuitive feel for the 24 hour clock. But if you haven’t used it regularly, which most ordinary Americans don’t, then yeah you just have to stop and do the arithmetic before you can connect 21:00 to your sense of time.
You know what fucks me up is that 21 has a “nine-ness” quality to it now that sometimes makes me mess up real math.
Hah I can believe that.
I’m not technically synaestehtic but I do have strong associations between numbers and colors, days of the week and colors.
Saturday has always been blue. Sunday is red. Number 4 is green, 3 is yellow, etc.
For a time I moved to an Islamic country where Friday is the holy day, not Sunday. So the weekends were Thursday-Friday and not Saturday-Sunday.
What was weird is that my red/blue associations with Saturday/Sunday shifted onto Thursday/Friday after a long time of living like this. And then I left that place and my associations shifted back.
The “nineness” of a thing, as you say, is hard to describe.
Do you think the sat/blue sun/red thing comes from calendars? I don’t think about it often, but I do think there is a “redness” to sunday.
oh that’s easy. all multiples of three, you add their digits and the digits add up to three.
also if you’ve made a transposition error (179 instead of 197) you will be off by a multiple of 9.
sorry bookkeepers i just gave away your trade secret. the one.
THAT’S 1530, PRIVATE!
NOW GIVE ME 20!20 factorial, of fuck
what is that, like extra noon or something?
They think it’s military time. I don’t know why because it doesn’t even read the same. Military would be something like thousand five hundred and thirty hours, we (people with 24h clocks) read it like fifteen thirty or three thirty in the afternoon, or even three thirty and omit the morning/afternoon part because it’s assumed from context.
Not really true either, it’s often called military time as a colloquialism because people will know what you mean and it strangely feels more normal/easier to say than “Twenty Four Hour Clock.”
EDIT: Also for the nomenclature, I personally still refer to time in the 12 hr format when talking, but if for some reason I have to say the 24 hr format it depends on the number. I would also say fifteen thirty for 15:30, but I would say fifteen hundred for 15:00.
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which is such a stupid way to tell time.
why tf do they concatenate hours and minutes!!! they aren’t even the same units!!!
I think they see it as some kind of metric time, and therefore something to be avoided at all costs.
No, we just have to do a little kindergarten (age 5) math, the difference between 12 and 15 is 3.
The 3rd-grade math (age 8) of figuring what time it will be 9 hours and 47 minutes later is equally difficult whether using 24h or am/pm. And may be easier using angles on an analog clockface, especially for an old fart like me.
The real problem with time isn’t 12h vs 24h. It’s the increments 12/24/60/30/15/5 when the rest of our system is base 10.
Oh and Daylight Savings. Jet lag without getting to go anywhere. Fuck that shit.
Yes, it angers and confuses them.
Pilot here, over been in the habit of using 12 hour for local time and 24 hour for zulu time. “12:45pm, 1745z”
No, it’s just associated with military time and those who don’t have friends from across the pond don’t necessarily know that other countries use that time format.
Just kidding we’re all just stupid
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.
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?
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.
12 hour time is a scam created by clockmakers who wanted to save paint.
speaking of those two formats, most of Europe uses both at the same time and sometimes it’s very annoying for us - “you said to meet you at 5!” “oh sorry i meant 15”
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.
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.
