As someone who grew up with a 24-hour clock, I can deal with 12 hours. Usually there’s no confusion if your store opens at 7am or 7pm. But 12:30PM being a valid time and meaning ‘00:30 on the next day’ fucks me up every time.
12:30 AM is 00:30 though?
They shouldn’t even have 12 on the clock, it should be 0 because the 12 hour clock is modulo 12.
He did say it always fucks him up :D
Case and point as to why it’s confusing lmao
“case in point” although "case and point " is arguably an eggcorn
Literally this. I was never in the military, and I’m glad they literally can’t draft me unless they lower a lot of requirements really fast. But 24-hour time is just so much more sensible. There’s no “AM or PM?” follow-up question, no guesswork. It just makes sense.
If they made metric time, I’d adopt that shit in a heartbeat.
the standard time that almost everyone uses is metric, i.e. is part of the metric system, its units are SI units. there was a system of decimal time, if that’s what you mean, developed in France during the revolution, where a day is 10 hours, each 100 minutes, each 100 seconds
so a decimal hour is 2.4 standard hours
a decimal minute is 1.44 standard minutes
a decimal second is 0.864 standard seconds
12:30 pm is half-past noon.
12:30 am is half past midnight, or as you would say 00:30
The m is “meridian” which is noon (sun straight up)
The a is ante/before and the p is post/after
In olden days it was easier to look up and set your clock at noon than midnight.
By the definition of post meridian, though, half past noon should be 0:30 pm.
12:30PM means 30 minutes after 12-noon.
Anyone saying that and meaning the middle of the night is just wrong, and if that’s a genuine thing people do it would drive me quite mad.
30 minutes after midnight is 12:30AM
As I said, it always fucks me up. The AM/PM indicator wraps at a different hour than the hours. Aaargh!
Perfectly illustrates how it doesn’t make sense.
I can get behind
- 11.30pm
- 12.30pm
- 1.30am
Or
- 11.30pm
- 0.30am
- 1.30am
But
- 11.30pm
- 12.30am
- 1.30am
just doesn’t make sense.
Did you mix up the first and third place? Because if 12:00 is “m”, it makes more sense for 12:30am to be night.
“Closes at 25:00” is funny too
But luckily unambiguous.
Only muricans think 24h clock = military time 😂
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.
speaking of those two formats, most of Europe uses both at the same time and sometimes it’s very annoying for us - “you said to meet you at 5!” “oh sorry i meant 15”
I do this because I kept setting AM alarms to PM and missing them. We are not the same.
Dealing with dates and times in software will get you formatting using year-month-date and 24 hour time as the least possible chance for confusion.
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.
There are two comments here:
- I can count to 24
- I get confused by 12PM
The real crime is dividing the day into 24h, 60m per hour, 60s per min.
A LOT of western measurement was base 12, the only reason people are so used to base 10 is because that’s how many fingers most people have. Base 12 is really useful however, it is uniquely divisible and 60 as 5*12 is even more so.
I don’t know why western, cause we got that from the Babylonians
Maybe it’s because of my understanding of history but I’d consider Iraq to be Western. It was more or less linked in with Europe going back to the bronze age much like how North Africa was. Frankly speaking the only reason it is usually separated is because of the great Schism and then the crusades which caused much of Europe to consider it as other.
are Americans really confused with 15:30?
Only inasmuch as I have to count from 12 because I don’t have the built-in instinct for that time format.
If you see a two-digit number beginning with 1, drop the first number and subtract two from the second number. If your sum is negative, it’s that many hours before noon.
If your number begins with 2, do the same thing. If your number is negative, it’s that many hours before 10pm.
Anything to not subtract 12
No, it’s just a familiarity thing and not even rare. It’s like switching between metric and imperial units, if you’re used to seeing something in one format it can be jarring to switch it in your head at a moments notice. A lot of people in the US use 24 hr time if they have a job relating to documentation or if their working hours can cause confusion.
For example, I have a client that has to document received material and they are open from 04:00 - 22:00. They use the 24 hr format because it is common to receive material at both 04:00 and 16:00 and having to make an extra column to type am or pm on their logs is stupid and is just another opportunity to make a mistake.
It’s really not a big deal to anyone, if you get a job that uses it then you switch your phone and within a week or two it’s second nature. Every blue moon someone will notice that all your clocks are set to a 24 hr clock and someone might ask why or what you do to need it, but that’s it.
t’s like switching between metric and imperial units,
I’d wager the imperial/metric change would be harder than the 12/24 change.
Probably so, but it’s still just immersion. If you work in Celsius every day for 2 weeks you’ll be able to switch Celsius without an issue.
I just don’t understand what pm and am mean:(
Past meridian and almost meridian?
Post meridiem and ante meridiem
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)
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
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!
dd.mm.yyyy
I believe in ISO 8601 supremacy
(I’m not saying its not better than American one thougn)
2026-04-13 rule
This is the way.
Large parts of the world use 24h time regularly. Only Americans, as far as I know, really struggle with 24h time, roundabouts, and bidets as concepts.
There are countries in Europe that don’t use bidets. Not even a handheld bidet shower. In those countries they don’t even wash their ass or cooch the old school way unless they are from a migrant family.
American here. I use 24h time, vastly favor roundabouts over traffic lights, and I would rather poop at home with my bidet attachment than get paid to poop at work. I’m not exactly your average American, but there are probably millions of us. The world mostly hears the loud dipshits because they are loud and their thoughts are dipshit enough that people who hear them feel the need to tell somebody about what a stupid dipshit take they heard from some loud dipshit.
Yeah, I’m also an American. Those are examples from personal experience.
When I was growing up the dipshit town where my family lived was thinking about installing a roundabout instead of the series of 4 lights in front of the Walmart. The level of genuine panic it caused was insane. Huge groups at city council meetings with signs worried about car insurance rates going up because of “all the accidents it will cause!” Needless to say, it didn’t happen. Meanwhile, roundabouts work just fine for the rest of Earth and I’ve only ever seen one accident in one, due to construction.
Roundabouts should decrease premiums, as they essentially eliminate Tbone collisions
Won’t somebody think of insurance companies!?
Why on earth would anyone be afraid of roundabouts? Like they aren’t even more complicated than traffic lights to understand.
Fear of change and hate of “The Other.” Town full of the most hate-filled Boomers I’ve ever seen.
did someone mention dipshittery? i have a card in case you need me
In Europe, all our roundabouts have bidets installed. This is to repel all the dipshits.
This is poetic
My wife is from Colombia and not used to the 24 hour system.
Does she refer to it as “hora militar” though?
No. She just says “in French” for the 24 hour system, and “in Spanish” for the 12 hour system, since that’s where she noticed the difference in our context.
Bahh… The full day is 2π.
- 12:00 is π
- 15:00 is 3/2π And so on… Sane people use 2π = 𝜏 instead.
Actually a day is slightly longer than 2π since our orbit shifts the point of the circle that faces the sun each revolution.
Only in America 24 hour is a 3 month long tv show
That’s nothing compared to 5 minutes in a Japanese anime.
That’s Dragon Ball!!
