It can be a benefit for night shift folks because that can really start to mess with your head. A digital watch can be a big help too.
Sometimes I struggle with time perception because of PTSD issues - I’ll lose track of whether it’s day/evening/night and whether I’ve slept etc. I accidentally set my watch to 12 hour mode when moving it an hour for daylight savings and it confused the shit out of me. It’s so much clearer to glance at and determine if it’s evening or daytime when there’s no p.m./a.m.
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.
I use 24h time because my frens are of different timezones
Damn, me and my friends are so poor we all have to share the one timezone
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Same thing in Argentina. As usual, USA are the weird ones xD
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
French?
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!
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.
dd.mm.yyyy
I believe in ISO 8601 supremacy
(I’m not saying its not better than American one thougn)
2026-04-13 rule
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.
This is the way.
too lazy to learn.
I just don’t understand what pm and am mean:(
Post meridian and ante meridian.
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…
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?
Listen, it’s easier, especially when you work with scientific or industrial systems
Only muricans think 24h clock = military time 😂
Well it kinda is 'cos jar heads can’t say 12:00, they say 1200, a literal twelve-hundred. Only military does that.
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.
Everything is military/war oriented. Remember the “war on drugs”? They can’t comprehend the world except from a perspective of opposition and control. 🤷🥲
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!!
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.
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.
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.
Says someone that grew up with them. And they are a little more complicated than “green means go, red means stop”. Efficiency and simplicity aren’t synonyms.
Personally I’m glad we are getting more of them. When I lived in England, and where I learned how to use them, I could see their effectiveness. This was long before they started gaining in popularity in the US. Living in the US, you may have only seen them in pictures, or in a scene in a movie, so it just looked like an absolute clusterfuck if you didn’t know what was going on. Now, I just wish people here would fucking signal properly when using them because that is really the key to maximizing their efficiency.
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 gave bidets installed. This is to repel all the dipshits.
Bidets are slowly growing in popularity in the USA. But only for home installation, I haven’t seen them in public restrooms yet.
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.
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
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.
