.beat tries to solve the problems of time zones. Similar solutions were proposed since the 19th century, and the problem with all of them is they don’t actually solve the problems, they just replace them with different problems. From wiki:
Advantages:
- The same time is used globally, which removes the requirement of calculations between different zones.
- Possible health benefits as people who live on the eastern side of a time zone are out of sync with the circadian rhythms.[1][9]
Disadvantages:
- The date will change during daylight hours in parts of the Americas and Asia-Pacific.
- Requires changes in linguistic terminology related to time.
- Conceptually, time zones would still be in effect as different regions would still carry out activities such as business hours, lunch, school, etc. at different UTC times, essentially trading one system for a tantamount one.
Jesus christ, I thought .beat died in the early 00’s with the failure of the Swatch physical watch line.
The main problem with .beat is that it’s decimal. Decimal is a terrible base for time keeping. 12, 60, and 360 all complement each other, with divisibility being more important in the end than how many fingers we have. There are good reasons why even the French stopped short of trying to decimalize time, reasons Swatch didn’t think through when they tried to find a new way of getting everyone to buy new watches.
I remember .beats being used as the clock in Phantasy Star Online ages ago. Is this still used for anything?
Everyone that needs a universal time is just using UTC.
