Muehe

Sittenhaft

*Sippenhaft

Sippe = kin/clan Sitte = morals/tradition

[...] a public institution is really not a great example of the general population [...]

Which I touched upon in my disclaimer, but in some ways it is a great example. Public institutions are defined by the general population, indirectly through their representatives creating the rules that govern them, and directly through contact with the public at large. Now if all our institutions still use this very outdated technology, and you can have trouble convincing them - during a global pandemic mind you - that using email is just as safe as using fax (so not safe at all basically), then that speaks to a larger mindset in the general population.

Many in the general public are also a lot quicker, some might even say careless, with adopting new technology of course. But as a society we are rather slow, and there are surprisingly many individuals who are hesitant or entirely resistant to adopting new technology. The fediverse usage is a bubble in a bubble here.

The internet infrastructure is another good example for this on the societal level, as there were plans in the 1980ies [!] to lay out a glass fibre network between every publicly used building in the country, which would have gotten us a good part of the way towards adopting this new material at scale. But in the end it was deemed unnecessary and too expensive and the project got canned (mixed in with rumours of "close friendship" between the chancellor and a major copper producer). Instead now we have people running around thirty years later and collecting signatures at the door for last-mile fibre network projects that seldom make quorum and thus almost never materialise public funding.

2. [...] But also how are Germans technologically behind regarding common personal life?

I bet you wherever in Germany you are, if you go to the website of your local city government right now they will have a still active fax number in their contact information. I guarantee it. Well if they have a website that is.

Which is a bit silly as an example but highlights the central problem, which is that adoption of new technology happens at a glacial pace, especially in public institutions. There are many reasons for that of course, some good, like the aforementioned inclination towards privacy, some bad like whatever allows fax machines to still be around.

And don't get me started on internet infrastructure... In an international comparison we certainly aren't leading the field regarding adoption of new technologies.

The number of littered bottles, with or without a cap, is greater than the number of loose caps,

That smells like survivorship bias. Your dataset is skewed by loose caps being way harder to find due to being smaller. It stands to reason that all those bottles without a cap you find will have also had their cap littered in the vast majority of cases.

So, I think it’s pretty stupid to argue whether “convicted felon” should be in his opening lede line for Wikipedia.

True though that may be, I don't think it's surprising that this would happen, and since making the post I have been falling down a rabbit hole of finding out how Wikipedia is handling situations like this, partly through taking more than a glancing look at the talk pages for the first time ever, and it's fascinating.

Currently my deepest point of descent is this sub-thread on the Admin board about the "consensus" boxes on top of talk pages being an undocumented and unapproved feature.

(not actually everything, but I get your hyperbole)

How is it hyperbole? All artificial neural networks have "hallucinations", no matter their size. What's your magic way of knowing when that happens?

It seems like it would be a bit confusing, though, if you had to relearn times whenever you travel somewhere (edit: and dates could flip over in the middle of a work day). But maybe you’d prefer that.

I'd prefer that over having to change clocks when you travel, and having to have knowledge about the location and possibly having to flip the date when you encounter a reference to a specific time, yes.

Before they were invented, it was literally just anarchy. People set it to match people they knew. That’s what I was thinking of, but it could also just be one place where noon is at 12:00 PM.

Yes, you would obviously do the latter. No sense it going back to the bad old days.

Well, there’s not a round number of second in a day, or days in a year, for example, since they’re all naturally occurring and arbitrary.

Days in a year ok (except leap years). But seconds in a day are round (discounting days with leap seconds). 24 * 60 * 60 = 86400, which is divisible by two. Did you mean they are not based on the decimal system? I'd be up for a decimal based time system and a reorganised calendar, but that wasn't the topic of discussion here.

And then the Earth turns at a subtly non-constant rate, and people have settled on a seven day week.

Yeah but none of that has much impact on the timezone debate.

If you do have timezones, it doesn’t make sense to be inflexible with them when they run up against geography or trade and cultural ties, so they’ll be curvy, and geopolitics will itself change over decades and someone will want to change which one they’re in.

Fair enough. I acknowledged this point in my other post, that there are historical reasons for timezones mostly rooted in administrative requirements. But I don't think this is a good reason to not adopt a better system per se.

All of this is a headache if you just want to do a calendar calculation.

Exactly! So out with the old, in with the new. Sure this will create some other headaches, especially given how deeply rooted some of the relevant nomenclature is in most languages, but the sooner we change this the less it will hurt. I see that it might be a non-starter given the inertia and disunity of globalised society working against it, but it still seems desirable nonetheless, to me at least.

I don’t think you could ever change my mind.

Fair enough, I still think you'd get used to it if it were to happen.

And when it does happen it’s usually clarified. In more automated contexts (e.g. a scheduled YouTube premiere) the software converts it automatically - the author inputs the date and time in their own timezone, and viewer sees the converted date and time in their own timezone.

My point exactly though, this is a whole lot of complexity we could just get rid of by using a single timezone, with the added benefit of that working without any automation or clarification. Next Tuesday 14:00? Same time for everybody, regardless of locality. Everyone will know what part of the solar day that is for them by habit.

When it does happen it reminds us that the date and time falls on a different time of day for different participants.

The complexity of coordinating different solar cycles is there either way and unavoidable. So why not use the simpler system?

Meet me here tomorrow at 01:00

Yes, semantic drift in these terms would be unavoidable, but I still see the long-term benefits to clarity outweighing the short-term costs in it.

We already have that for technology to use - the unix timestamp.

A unix timestamp is an offset to a UTC date, not a timezone. But fair enough, there is UTC. It's not used by default however, except by scientists and programmers maybe.

Maybe I’m missing something. What do you think the benefits would be?

Removing ambiguity from casual language. Currently when you state a time you are almost always implying your local timezone applies, which might be unknown information to the recipient, especially with written sources like these comments here. With everybody using the same timezone instead you would always make an unambiguous statement about the specific time by default.

What would happen on people that live in UTC+12:00 ? When your friend say “lets meet on Tuesday”, which Tuesday it is (because the day changes at noon)?

Given how +12 is at the front of the "date wave" currently they would probably take it to mean the Monday/Tuesday noon.

People will resist such majorly inconvenience changes unless the benefit of switching is clear for them. Forcing unpopular changes will guarantee people using unofficial timezone which cause even more confusion down the line.

Yeah fair. To me the benefit is clear, there is no good rhyme or reason to timezones as a totality, we should come up with a better system. A straightforward approach like using UTC offsets seems best.