995
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] YoorWeb@lemmy.world 92 points 1 year ago

I work with Americans and this hits home hard. It's especially infuriating when they format their dates. "I had a meeting with so-and-so on 4/5" and nobody has any fucking clue what they mean.

The worst part is how hopelessly oblivious they are about it. It's not even like they don't care that nobody does things their stupid way - it's the fact that they're so insulated that they can't even fathom that nobody does things the same way they do. It just goes to show how clueless they are about the rest of the world and how little they get out of their neighborhoods.

It drives me mad. At this point, it's just offensive how ignorant they can be sometimes. If you have to work with other people, you should at least make an effort to be aware of the fact that others do things a different way and try to avoid situations like this, but they just refuse to do so.

Apologies... /rant

[-] tamiya_tt02@lemmy.world 20 points 1 year ago

I'm American and always use 30 Dec 2023 as my date scheme. It makes much more sense. I also work in a multicultural laboratory, so there should be no question as to what date it is, but some of my colleagues still use mm-dd-yy.

[-] fallingcats@discuss.tchncs.de 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

some of my colleagues still use mm-dd-yy.

That makes it even worse. When the date uses slashes I expect it to be American, but with dashes anything other than yyyy-mm-dd doesn't even read as a date to me

[-] CrypticCoffee@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

Nah. I'm British, and today is 31/12/2023. We use slashes. American's are just wrong.

Thanks, I appreciate it! I also try to use the name of the month instead of the number as frequently as possible. To be honest, it's not really the order of the fields that matters - format it whichever way makes you happy! Just make sure it's not ambiguous so other people can tell what you mean. And be aware that not everyone interprets things the same way you do

[-] RBWells@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago

Like the American below, I generally use 30-December 2023 partly because I work with an international company but mostly because after the century rolled over and we had years that looked like months I got confused.

Had a boss that formatted all dates as YYYY-MM-DD because that makes them sort correctly in lists.

[-] Rootiest@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year ago

Had a boss that formatted all dates as YYYY-MM-DD because that makes them sort correctly in lists.

That's how you know it's the correct date format

I work in an international company too! And yet, this confusion persists :-/

I also format everything YYYY-MM-DD for my personal use too. When writing prose, usually some other format is just fine, but I really would love if everyone did year-month-day

load more comments (3 replies)
[-] JDubbleu@programming.dev 13 points 1 year ago

Everyone should be using ISO8601 anyway. yyyy-mm-dd is superior to both and leaves 0 ambiguity to the reader no matter where they're from.

[-] PM_ME_WRISTS_GIRL@lemmynsfw.com 9 points 1 year ago

Besides the dates, I also still don't know if 12am is noon or midnight. Do Americans know? Is there a problem with simply counting to 24?

[-] Rehwyn@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

12:00AM is midnight because AM is morning, and it's the beginning of the morning.

Using 12-hour time is just a historical artifact from all our analog clocks having 12 hours on their face and not wanting to have to add 12 to the number on the clock for half the day.

[-] Akareth@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Where I'm from, 12:00 a.m. (00:00) is the middle of the night (we call it midnight here), and morning begins when the sun rises (and we say "good morning" during our mornings).

[-] Rehwyn@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Put more specifically, A.M. and P.M. are abbreviations for "ante meridiem" and "post meridiem", which are Latin for "before mid-day" and "after mid-day" respectively. Since a new day begins at midnight, it follows that midnight is 12:00 A.M. since it's the 12 o'clock that is before mid-day.

[-] nao@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago

12:00AM is midnight because AM is morning, and it's the beginning of the morning.

That doesn’t make it less confusing, it’s the beginnng of the morning but uses the highest available number.

[-] misophist@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Yes, it makes perfect sense to count our hours as such:

12, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

/s

12AM is midnight. As for the other part I have this mind blowing concept for you, our culture is not the same as yours. We have our own ways of doing things, just like you.

[-] Sanyanov@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Why should anyone cut time in two zones? How does it help or benefit anyone? If anything, it only serves to add extra confusion. In the era of electronic time keeping, there is a wonderful opportunity to ditch an extremely stupid decision that was proliferated by analog clocks.

We have 24 hours in a day, just count them one by one. Boom. Problem solved. No confusion, no complications, no nothing.

load more comments (4 replies)
[-] Rootiest@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

PM is evening, AM is morning.

I prefer 24hr time but 12hr is not confusing

Exactly and it's such a minor thing to bitch about, I understand the date system frustration but over using AM/PM vs 24?

[-] Deme@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The notations can be confusing, especially around noon and midnight. Is midnight am or pm when it's equally distant to both the previous and the next noon? Why does 12am not follow 11am???

Where I live we use 12hr time in casual spoken language but pretty much always specify the time of day as well, like eight in the evening or twelve at midnight. But for anything written or even remotely formal, 24h time is used for obvious reasons.

[-] Akareth@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Where I'm from, 12:00 a.m. (00:00) is the middle of the night (we call it midnight here), and morning begins when the sun rises (and we say "good morning" during our mornings).

[-] Rootiest@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

So if you worked at a hotel or airport or a coffee shop or something and you saw someone shortly before sunrise you would say "Good night" not "Good morning"?

[-] YoorWeb@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Not all languages work the same way as English does. You shouldn't think in English terms in this case. His language may use hello as a rule in these situations or have a completely different word without equivalent in English.

Agreed. I've never understood the logic of splitting the hours of the day in half. 1800 is so much nicer than 6PM.

I don't think that's purely an American thing though. If I had to guess, I'd say that most of the world uses 12-hour clocks instead of 24-hours. I could be wrong though. Nevertheless, I usually write all times in 24-hour format. But it always sounds awkward trying to use it in speech. I haven't figured out a good way to do that yet.

[-] mmagod@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

heck even inside these borders.. the concept of timezones blows their minds at work lol..

them: "yeah let's set a meeting at 9am!"

me: eastern? pacific? central? help me... heeeelllp meee

[-] platypus_plumba@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Yes, we'll have the meeting on 3/2/2023

And I'm like.... FUCK. I'll have to ask again.

[-] Sanyanov@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

And get answered like: "2nd of March, DUH"

[-] AWittyUsername@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I hate when software is hard coded either those stupid fucking dates. I generally uninstall

[-] Tankton@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Oh god or when you can choose between 4/5/23 or 5/4/23 and your like.... '_'

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] doggle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 1 year ago

Isn't basing a temperature scale on the freezing and boiling points of water a bit arbitrary in and of itself?

The reason they are arbitrary numbers in Fahrenheit is because they weren't considerations when the scale was made.

[-] Deme@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago

Water is everywhere.

Cooking, weather, etc. You are also water.

[-] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 11 points 1 year ago

Except that water boils at different temperatures when exposed to different amounts of pressure.

So this works pretty universally on earth.... Near the ground/ocean level (plus or minus a few hundred meters). Once you get outside of that specific condition the numbers move.

So yes, fairly arbitrary.

Let's all switch to Kelvin.

[-] SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 points 1 year ago

The nice thing about celcius and kelvin is that they're the same scale, but celcius is just shifted 273.15 units. And it's more intuitive for humans to work with smaller numbers with bigger relative differences. But yes, kelvin would be a lot better to work with, especially considering stuff like doubling temperature (doubling energy) would actually work correctly in kelvin.

But if there's one thing that makes a lot of sense to base temperature enough for human use, I would indeed say it's water, because all life uses water, we are completely surrounded by it, and it's super important to nearly everything we do too.

[-] Deme@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Sure, but the vast majority of people live in low lying areas and even then it doesn't shift that drastically. You need to climb a mountain to see the difference when it comes to applications of daily life.

Although now that I think about it. The same criticism applies to pretty much every definition of temperature that is based on the behaviour of matter. This also applies to Kelvin. Temperature is a property of matter and every type of matter behaves differently.

load more comments (2 replies)
[-] BluesF@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

It is, but if you look at how Farenheit was conceived it's absurdly nonsensical. 0°F is the freezing temperature or some mixture of chemicals, and 90°F is a guess at human body temperature lmao.

And the freezing/boiling points of water are arbitrary except in that they are used to actually define both scales. They provide easily measurable standards.

[-] deegeese@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

No, 0° was the lowest temperature recorded in the city Fahrenheit lived, and 100° was considered normal body temperature, with the quality of thermometer available at the time.

It’s quite arbitrary, but ends up mapping pretty nicely to comfortable ranges for humans.

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] force@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Well TECHNICALLY it's not based on the state change of water.

It's based on the formula C = K - 273.15 where K = 1.380649×10^−23 / (6.62607015×10^−34)(9192631770) * h * Δν[Cs] / k where k is the Boltzmann constant (1.380649×10^−23 J * K^-1), h is the Planck constant, and Δν[Cs] is the hyperfine transition frequency of Caesium

So even MORE abstract and unrelatable

load more comments (6 replies)
[-] barsoap@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Every scale and unit is, ultimately, arbitrary. We all do have a very good understanding of what freezing and boiling water is, though, we don't have a good intuition of "coldest day in some random place in some random year" is. Then there's a couple of other common points of orientation: 20C is room temperature, 37C body temperature and thus warm baths and "it's too bloody hot outside" hover around that (you actually want wet-bulb temperature for that, but it's still a point of orientation), another point is about 60C which is the hottest you can have a beverage and drink it without excessive slurping. Also a common temperature in cooking as that's when a lot of stuff starts to denature, e.g. egg white is about 62-65C, the temperature you want to hit for carbonara to not get scrambled eggs.

Practically everything we deal with in everyday life (short of winter weather) is within that 0-100 range. Which is due, to, well, water being liquid in that range.

[-] blueson@feddit.nu 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If you want to be radical, use Kelvin. At least it scaled identical to C so it's easy to comprehend.

[-] Venicon@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago

I would like to dump on America for this but as Scotland is in the UK we have some unholy abomination of in between when it comes to our measurements.

this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2023
995 points (94.9% liked)

Lemmy Shitpost

27209 readers
3575 users here now

Welcome to Lemmy Shitpost. Here you can shitpost to your hearts content.

Anything and everything goes. Memes, Jokes, Vents and Banter. Though we still have to comply with lemmy.world instance rules. So behave!


Rules:

1. Be Respectful


Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.

Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.

...


2. No Illegal Content


Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.

That means:

-No promoting violence/threats against any individuals

-No CSA content or Revenge Porn

-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)

...


3. No Spam


Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.

-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.

-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.

-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers

-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.

...


4. No Porn/ExplicitContent


-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.

-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.

...


5. No Enciting Harassment,Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts


-Do not Brigade other Communities

-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.

-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.

-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.

...


6. NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.


-Content that is NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.

-Content that might be distressing should be kept behind NSFW tags.

...

If you see content that is a breach of the rules, please flag and report the comment and a moderator will take action where they can.


Also check out:

Partnered Communities:

1.Memes

2.Lemmy Review

3.Mildly Infuriating

4.Lemmy Be Wholesome

5.No Stupid Questions

6.You Should Know

7.Comedy Heaven

8.Credible Defense

9.Ten Forward

10.LinuxMemes (Linux themed memes)


Reach out to

All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules. Striker

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS