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7 points
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And the problem with that is… ?

The problem is that the date changes in the middle of the day. 00:00 (“midnight”) should occur around the middle of the night, so that one day (sunrise to sunset) has a single date assigned to it.

In my opinion it would make more sense to set 00:00 at slightly before sunrise (roughly 4:00 by my clock), that way one night “belongs” to the day that preceded it. But for whatever reason they decided that the date changes in the middle of the night. That’s fine. Middle of the day would not be fine.

Edit: hey cool, Japan kinda agrees with me! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Japan#Time

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5 points

Anyone who works nights, or an evening job that runs late like a bar or something, is currently used to having the date change in the middle of their “day”. I don’t think it’s really that big of a deal. It would be super weird at first, but kids who grew up with it would find our current system just as bananas as we would find this.

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4 points

Yeah but you still mentally consider it to be the same day as the preceding day, until you go to sleep. (Unless you stay up all night but that’s very uncommon, my sympathy to night shift workers)

If the date changes in the middle of the day, does that make the latter half of the day “tomorrow” from the first half? That’s absurd to me.

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1 point

The fact that you give a preference to change something here which you give as an example for something that shouldn’t be changed because it would be problematic is deeply ironic to me.

Also, again, I don’t really see the problem with changing the date in the middle of the day. It’s virtually the same as changing it at 00:00 or 04:00, you change the date once every 24 hours. Right now you have a situation where one persons 3rd of the month could be another persons 2nd or 4th, depending on where on the globe they are. That’s not really ideal either, especially for that call scheduling example by the GP.

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4 points

Don’t you think it makes sense for the date to change while ~everyone is asleep?

International light-speed communication is what we internet dwellers are used to but it’s not most people’s experience. Most people rarely talk to people from another continent.

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2 points
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Tilde as natural language punctuation, meaning “roughly” or “approximately”. I like it.

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-1 points

Oh don’t get me wrong, I see how it makes sense. I’m just saying that 1) it is arbitrary nonetheless and 2) it doesn’t outweigh the benefits that could be gained by using a single global timezone. Incidence angle of solar radiation is hardly something most people need or even want to track beyond a certain degree (dawn, noon, dusk, midnight), and the times that would coincide with at your latitude and longitude can be easily learned.

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