this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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Time units are just as cursed as American units.
Conversion between days, hours, minutes and seconds is a total mess. If you never have to do anything with those numbers, you don’t need to worry about it. The moment you need to do calculations or compare devices you run into completely unnecessary problems that would have been easy to avoid. Just think of pumps and fans with units given in l/min or m^3/h.
Just pick the standard time unit and stick with it. Use prefixes to deal with big or small numbers.
This is why I kinda wish we had metric time as standard, but absolutely nobody would adopt it now unless they actually find t useful
Using seconds as the base unit of time would work in various situations, but not all. For example, kiloseconds (ks) would be handy for measuring the runtime of a movie or the length of a workday. In that regard, it’s just a matter of getting used to it. However the length of a solar day is about 86.4 ks and a year is about 31.54 Ms, which would be annoying numbers to memorize. Then again, remembering numbers like 60, 24, 52, 365 is about as annoying too, so that’s a problem for another day.