Don’t want the payroll people confuse the night shift with the morning shift. It’s purely an economical arrangement. Besides I ain’t even American.
Well I’m glad to be an actual us army veteran so I can unapologetically use the 24-hour format, which is easier & makes more sense than the 12-hour format.
American 24-hour user here. Its just a lot easier to calculate time intervals and tell the time from a quick glance with 24-hour time.
What is that image getting across to me? Is that from a film or something?
I have the same question. Because if that picture is supposed to represent stolen valor, or poseur, I don’t think it’s working.
I do this because I kept setting AM alarms to PM and missing them. We are not the same.
I just feel like I’m in Europe again. I still prefer 12 hr times.
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.
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.
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
I don’t speak the language, but this looks like it would literally translate to something like “half of the fourth hour” which in English we might say as “half past three”. Kind of interesting that we might say “quarter to four” to mean 3:45, but never “half til four” to mean 3:30.
Yup, it is just half an hour before, very commonly used here. There’s some other English language (Australian?) where it means the opposite - totally not confusing.
We also use quarter to/quarter past as well of course
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
As an American who uses military time on everything, nobody has ever judged me for it. I am not military either.
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.
