------------------------------------------------------ From: Marko Mäkelä msmakela@gmail.com > On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 09:50:02PM +0100, smf wrote: > >It makes it complicated when your boss tells you to do something on > >Tuesday though. > [..] > >Using local time fixes the problem for the majority of people and the > >minority come up with their own solutions. > If you had written "today" instead of "Tuesday", I could have agreed. > Due to your choice of words, the nitpicking has to go on :) Marko, my man :-) I replied off-list but yes, after going through the points and responding to them, I concluded that [if you look at it closer, with critical eye] in fact it doesn’t “fix” anything. It only feeds the habits/convention, which are not a bit better (often worse, less logical) than other possible conventions.. > According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_calendar#Week the > Chinese have (had) several different weeks (of 7, 10, 12, or 60 days). > The Maya calendar seems to divide the year into 18 groups of 20 days > each; I guess they did not see a need to divide such "months" to bigger > units than days. .. and that most people don’t even know that there are other systems even currently in use (let alone those, which are no longer in use) > I guess that this applies to all standards and conventions. This is why > there are so many to choose from: http://xkcd.com/927/ > > The Chinese seem to have a pragmatic approach to standards. I have been > to Shanghai and Hangzhou, Hangzhou’s my favourite :-) > and even in some restrooms you could see wall > sockets that would almost accept almost any plug that is used somewhere > in the world. (I write "almost accept", because it can make a flaky > contact.) The inventor of the Schuko plug would rotate in his grave when > he saw such a wall socket that is not recessed and does not provide a > ground contact, but it "fixes the problem for the majority of people". > The minority (Europeans) have come up with their own solutions. :) For non-critical eye it may look like the time zoning  fixes something. But only the problems it creates itself first. In other words: first create some problems in order to be able to try to work them around and claim “I fixed the problem” ;-) -- SD! Message was sent through the cbm-hackers mailing listReceived on 2014-04-29 11:00:03
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