8 ms·
Maybe the world should standardize on: Driving on the right Speaking English The metric system The 2024-06-09 date format The Celsius scale
by mg 2y ago
Maybe the world should standardize on:
Driving on the right
Speaking English
The metric system
The 2024-06-09 date format
The Celsius scale
The 24-hour clock
- SahAssar 2y ago> Speaking English If you mean teaching english as a second language, I can agree. If you mean switching over to it as the primary language I hard disagree.
- checkyoursudo 2y agoI am fluent in one language and speak three others passably, and have order-a-beer/ask-for-a-toilet/get-directions ability in a few others. It does not matter to me which language I use to communicate. Why should it? The one I am fluent in is not the language of any of my ancestors if I go back just a couple of generations. So what? My children are natively fluent in two languages. Neither of their languages is a second language. Which language should I tell them is their primary language?
- Novosell 2y agoAre you trying to make a point or..? It's a bit unclear. People can have multiple languages they're native in, that doesn't mean we should try to replace every language with English.
- checkyoursudo 2y ago> that doesn't mean we should try to replace every language with English Where did I say that everyone should speak only English? I do not care what language people speak. > Are you trying to make a point or..? Why are you being unkind? Or hostile, or whatever this is? I was asking a question. I understand that people think they will lose something if they speak a different language. My native language is not the same as any of my ancestors from just a few generations ago, and I want to know what difference it makes?
- Novosell 2y agoLanguage and culture go hand in hand. I don't understand how you've learnt 1 fluently and 3 passably and are deemingly completely missing this aspect to it. So to standardize language is to attempt to standardize culture which I would imagine we don't wanna do, right? And it doesn't matter what your ancestors spoke, of course. But it does matter what those around you speak, now. Neither the person you originally responded to or me have mentioned ancestors.
- tsimionescu 2y agoSpeaking a different language than your great great great grandfather ("a few generations ago") is not always very impactful, though even this means you can no longer read letters or poetry or novels that they may have written or just loved. You can no longer understand laws that they might have obeyed, understand speeches that influenced them, and so many other things that keep a culture going beyond generations. However, that pales in comparison to what the transition means, not speaking the same language as your grandparents. You get a huge gulf of distance from relatives who, for the majority of humanity, are some of their most beloved and close relationships.
- SahAssar 2y agoUsually people have one primary language which is usually the one predominantly used in the home they grew up in (or maybe the one used for their primary education). If you have multiple, that's fine, but your disregarding the reality for 90%+ of people if you don't think most people have a language that is their "primary". > It does not matter to me which language I use to communicate. Why should it? For most people language is tied to their culture and history. I'm just saying that we should not mandate that people use a certain language as their "primary". It would be nice if we had a global way to passably communicate though.
- checkyoursudo 2y agoYeah, I get what you are saying. I would never want to mandate any language. I think it is dumb when countries have official languages as opposed to e.g. operating languages. I just think that people are more worried about the homogenization of language than they need to be. In fact, with how quickly culture is homogenizing around the world, I think that it is even possible that language differences outlast cultural differences over the medium term. Teenagers in a lot of the world I have been to in the past years dress/behave/express themselves ... not very differently. Everywhere I go in the world, old shit is different, but modern shit is depressingly the same, or really similar anyway.
- SahAssar 2y ago> Everywhere I go in the world, old shit is different, but modern shit is depressingly the same, or really similar anyway. That seems like a very reductive take. Of course trends and culture is more global since we now communicate globally, but there are definitely regional cultures and values and those are expressed many different ways. If I travel from my small european city to a city in the american midwest or a city in nigeria that are going to be massive differences regardless if the teens are doing the same tiktok dance or whatever metric of homogenization you pick. But in all of those places I almost everyone I will meet can speak english.
- andoando 2y agoI imagine having offical languages dictates that all the state functions have to operate in said official languages. If you have a government office for example, your website, pamphlets, administered tests etc for example have to be printed in the official language. Would be a mess if that was not enforced
- qwertox 2y ago> as a second language It should go beyond that, a second official language, so that all signs, documents and government interactions should be just as valid in both languages.
- SahAssar 2y agoI think that if it were to become a official second language that would be a natural second step, if nothing else just for efficiency in regions that currently have multiple languages.
- cupofjoakim 2y agoI can agree on all of the points except "Speaking English". The way things are going it's going to be either that or mandarin regardless, but there's so much culture in language that IMO it'd be a shame to hurry it up.
- mg 2y agoI don't know enough about Mandarin to have an opinion on it. The language has more characters than what fits on a keyboard, right? I wonder how typing on a keyboard feels. I guess only people who have experience in writing Mandarin and English can compare the feeling.
- toxik 2y agoWriting Mandarin with pinyin is way easier, you just type the first letter of each sound in a sentence. “I like to eat ice cream” is 我喜歡吃冰淇淋, written entirely by the letter sequence wxhcbql.
- mmmrk 2y agoEnglish is more likely than Mandarin, because lots of people (including the mainland Chinese working in sectors that interface with the outside world) can speak some English, but very few people outside China speak any Mandarin. Nassim Taleb wrote about this in https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict....
- triyambakam 2y agoNo daylight savings time ...would be one that I would add.
- usr1106 2y agoMaybe all should use Beijing time, Moscow time, or UTC? Seriously, I think the planet has bigger problems than discussing about DST.
- elaus 2y agoFound the German. On a serious note: compared to the other inconsistencies, this seems like a very minor one. If we wanted to standardize time, we should agree on ONE timezone across the world. But of course that seems almost impossible: Having to convince 8 billion people on a change that has little benefit in their everyday life.
- noduerme 2y agoHow would one timezone work? The sun sets at 8:00 in one place and sets at 20:00 on the other side of the world? In terms of working or traveling between time zones, it seem like it would be much harder to remember the fact that, for instance, people in New York stop work when the clock says 17:00 and people in LA work until 20:00, than to remember that they are three time zones apart.
- usrusr 2y agoIIRC the more serious proposals for a global time scheme deliberately abandon the old 24:60:60 so that daylight expectations, locally as they would be, would have to be re-learned anyways. Up to that point that doesn't sound that bad to me. But where i don't see any chance is durations, how many seconds/minutes/hours. I suspect that a change to duration units would be even harder to adapt to than metrification of lengths.
- teddyh 2y agoSo You Want To Abolish Time Zones <https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish>
- purple-leafy 2y ago> Driving on the right No thanks > 2024-06-09 date format That doesnt infer what you want. Are you saying you want YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY-DD-MM
- geysersam 2y agoThey want YYYY-MM-DD
- codetrotter 2y agoLook at what date it is today, and then try to guess which one of these format is the one they are referring to. Also: one of these is an ISO standard format. The other one is a format that no one would use. (DD/MM YYYY is in use, but no one would write YYYY-DD-MM.)
- purple-leafy 2y agoDon’t Americans do: MM-DD-YYYY? So it would stand to reason that an American commenter may be meaning YYYY-DD-MM And guessing based on todays date, tell that to commenters who check this post in 6 months
- adastra22 2y agoAmericans do mm/dd/yyyy, but never mm-dd-yyyy
- xjay 2y agoUnderscore as a separator, YYYY_MM_DD: 1970_01_01 2024_06_09 2024_12_31 16383_12_31 Treated as base-10 number literal in some programming languages. 5 bits for DD [0, 31] + 4 bits for MM [0, 15] + 14 or more bits for year [0, 16_383] = 23 bits.
- yokoprime 2y agoNobody ever should write YYYY-DD-MM, its the worst of both worlds with the structure being both in a non-logical order AND not conforming to how dates are pronounced.
- constantcrying 2y ago>Speaking English Having worked in an international organization where most people communicated in English and most people were ESL, going back to a company where my native language was the norm was a huge benefit in clarity of communications. Languages certainly form how we think, a universal language undoubtedly leads to worse communication and worse ideas.
- falcor84 2y agoMy understanding was that the parent recommends standardizing the native language throughout the world, rather than enforcing ESL.
- constantcrying 2y agoSure, but how would I teach my children English as a first language, when my English is only ESL. And even if I could, I would never do that, as a diversity in languages directly leads to a diversity in thought.
- graemep 2y agoI agree about diversity in languages being a good thing. I also see minor languages gradually dying out. First languages do change with time so it does happen, and it can be induced to happen. My grandparents all spoke English as a first language, but if you go back a few more generations only one of my great (or possibly great great) grandparents ancestors would have done.
- falcor84 2y agoDiversity in thought is great, but I don't think that distinct native languages are a prerequisite for that. Throughout history, the societies that were able to achieve the greatest accomplishments, according to most any measure, are those with the most people using the same language.
- encom 2y ago>clarity of communications I (native dane) work in robotics. Our company has a disproportionate amount of non-danes employed, who also are not native english speakers. I've been reading and writing english since I was very young, but having almost never spoken it makes face-to-face communication challenging. And not only that, but I encounter colleagues conversing in Hindi, Russian, Hungarian, Polish, Greek etc. Any of those conversations is one I'm locked out of, and unable to contribute to. It's really a Tower Of Babel type of situation here. Effective communication is a frustrating chore, especially since we're talking about highly technical subjects. Upper management thinks our diversity is a strength, but I'm just not seeing it from where I'm sitting. In my next job, this is a situation I will seek to avoid.
- wood_spirit 2y agoGreat list! Let’s add Euros and universal health care too!
- bjoli 2y agoThe euro was great for Germany. Others weren't that happy.
- netsharc 2y agoYour comment is grey because people are downvoting you. But you're right, and it makes me think HN has more ignoramus than curious hackers... It's economics: https://seekingalpha.com/article/564881-how-germany-benefited-from-the-euro https://seekingalpha.com/article/564881-how-germany-benefite... https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/german-adjustment/ https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/0...
- dang 2y agoWould you please stop posting low-value comments that break the site guidelines? They explicitly ask you not to (a) go on about downvotes or (b) sneer at the rest of the community. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- morjom 2y agoDid it happen yesterday? Did it happen last month? Did it happen last year? I feel like that's the order I ask questions if wonder when something happened.
- beardyw 2y ago> Driving on the right More people in India drive on the left than North America and Europe put together.
- lokimedes 2y agoThat would end all communication between frontend and backend developers.
- bsza 2y ago> Speaking English That’s the opposite of what we should do. If a plant monoculture is susceptible to diseases, then a language monoculture is susceptible to mind-viruses. What would the world look like now if every country spoke German in 1933?
- tsimionescu 2y agoMostly the same as today, if that was the only difference? Same language is a result of cultural similarity much more so than a cause for it. If there is no political or cultural pressure to speak the same language, they relatively quickly diverge.
- bsza 2y agoWhat I was implying is, language barriers are a firewall against charismatic, manipulative psychopaths trying to brainwash you into doing unspeakable things. They do so by turning "he has a point" into "who is this funny little moustache guy and why does he sound so angry?"
- marginalia_nu 2y agoI'd argue lacking a shared global language is more likely to isolate a population and ensure they can only hear the local mustache man's narrative.
- bsza 2y agoBut having one gives a platform for those narratives to spread and potentially become dominant. To be clear, I'm not saying freedom of press between countries should be eliminated (quite the contrary!), only that diversity of languages should be preserved. In my opinion, this does two things: 1. Allows more diverse ideas to come into being, as language directly affects on one's way of thinking. 2. Slows the spread of dangerous ideas, due to some of their appeal (or the charisma of their advocates) being lost in translation.
- d-lisp 2y agoMaybe, maybe the world should standardize on: Driving on the left Speaking creole The metric system The 09/06/2024 date format The Kelvin scale The french decimal time system The AuthaGraph projection
- asddubs 2y ago230v 50Hz
- carlosjobim 2y ago> Speaking English Let's standardize that to the Newspeak version of English for clarity and to make hackers happy.
- emchammer 2y agoSorry, why would you write 2024? I thought it's the year 5784.
- euroderf 2y ago> Speaking English Not worth discussing until some serious improvements to the spelling system. Currently learning it requires learning two obnoxiously independent systems, the written and the spoken.
- KSteffensen 2y agoAligning the EPAL pallet and the 30' container is another great candidate that is just not going to happen.
- Ekaros 2y agoWhich one should be changed? The pallet or the container?
- KSteffensen 2y agoWhichever is cheaper. My gut feeling says pallet, but I have no idea.