7 ms·
Our dumb calendar. Daylight savings time. Hell, time zones themselves. How many more dumb decisions of the past will we have to continue enduring just for the s
by dclowd9901 3y ago
Our dumb calendar. Daylight savings time. Hell, time zones themselves. How many more dumb decisions of the past will we have to continue enduring just for the sake of, well, keeping things the same?
- kyleyeats 3y agoThe months named after 7, 8, 9 and 10 are the 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th months.
- satvikpendem 3y agoYou can thank a few Roman imperators for that.
- NullPrefix 3y agoJulius and Augustus
- WesolyKubeczek 3y agoThe people who named those months had years started in March, so it checks out like that legacy variable in that legacy code whose name, type, description in the comment, and actual purpose all have grown to contradict each other.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoOdds are that bothered people in the past more than it bothers people now, making it a somewhat strange example of being forced to live with the stupid decisions of the past.
- msla 3y agoThe guy responsible for that ought to be stabbed.
- 77pt77 3y agoOne of the most relevant countries in the world still uses length measurements based on the foot of the length of their previous despot and they absolutely refuse to change. Nothing will change for a very long time.
- defrost 3y agoWhat country are you talking about? The USofA standard foot has been officially defined in terms of the SI International System of Units since 1893. Since 1866 if you date it from the specification proposed by US Congress. https://www.nist.gov/pml/us-surveyfoot https://www.nist.gov/pml/us-surveyfoot
- zzo38computer 3y agoIt is good that they define foot, inches, etc by SI units, because SI units are well-defined scientific units (except, until recently, the definition of kilogram was no good), and for the appropriate purposes the foot, inches, etc can be reasonable measures (while SI units are good for general purposes, the others are good for the specific purposes), so now they are also well-defined units.
- wpm 3y agoAnd it'll never stop being funny how mad this makes the rest of the world for really no apparent reason at all. (inb4 link to mars reconnaissance orbiter wikipedia page)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- throwaway892238 3y ago> How many more dumb decisions of the past will we have to continue enduring just for the sake of, well, keeping things the same? I dunno. When do you predict all national, ethnic and religious identities will go away? I'm going with 100,000 years.
- huytersd 3y agoWith easily accessible gene replacement therapy? Probably 50.
- 77pt77 3y agoOnly through bioengineering warfare.
- gpvos 3y agoNo, that won't change anything.
- huytersd 3y agoOf course it will. If you can say for instance change races when you move to a different country or fundamentally modify the human drive to be tribal, you can change a lot.
- msla 3y agoGenes are, at best, a correlate to culture and ethnicity, and sometimes a weak one. For example, the "one-drop rule" ensured that people with very little African ancestry would be Black (or other, ruder terms) for the purposes of American racial discourse and, therefore, culture.
- huytersd 3y agoThat would become less and less relevant if African and caucasians could change their races and appearance at will.
- 3y ago
- ks2048 3y agoDaylight savings time is dumb. But, I think time zones are not. It's very useful to have some measure of the hours that is roughly the same around the world Maybe some time zone borders are dumb, but mostly they follow the necessary complexities of political boundaries, geography, history, etc.
- 77pt77 3y agoAnyone that finds timezones dumb should have a look at China. Only on timezone. From the eastern border with Russia, to the border with Afghanistan.
- ks2048 3y agoYeah, China is pretty bad. There is a cool map that shows the "errors" between local time and "ideal": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone#/media/File:Solar_time_vs_standard_time.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone#/media/File:Solar_ti...
- kccqzy 3y agoAnd then you talk to anyone from western parts of China and they tell you the single-timezone policy is blatant geographical discrimination by the central government.
- matricaria 3y ago> It's very useful to have some measure of the hours that is roughly the same around the world You could just have the same time everywhere. The only thing that changes is that 12 o’clock isn’t midday anymore, which doesn’t match with the current system almost anywhere.
- ks2048 3y agoSo in a story someone says, "I woke up at 5:00 every day" it would be meaningless without also knowing roughly what longitude they were at (With time zones it's approximate, but we know it means they woke up early). If we had a "universal time" - like all our clocks are on UTC - I think people would naturally invent local times and we'd be back to time zones.
- msla 3y agoTime zones acknowledge that everyone synchronizes with the people around them, possibly with some added information about people who are theoretically too far away to be in the same time zone together but still want to synchronize with each other. (This gets really absurd in the Pacific, but every time zone has odd jogs.) Removing time zones won't make that synchronization stop happening, it'll just make it more difficult to predict which clock distant people are really keeping in terms of when they're up and active and doing business.