Announcing: Die Wahre Zeit-Partei

I am founding a political party. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Die Wahre Zeit-Partei (“The True Time Party”). Here’s the platform: we are going to fix the clock.

The Reform

A day gets 10 hours.

An hour gets 100 minutes.

A minute gets 100 seconds.

Everything below a second stays exactly as it was, because frankly nobody was struggling with milliseconds and thousands are good.

Days and years don’t change, they are astronomically defined.

It’s still one rotation of the Earth, still one trip around the sun, nobody’s touching that.

We are not redefining physics. We are redefining how we slice it, because whoever decided 24/60/60 was a good idea clearly hated the rest of us. 🙄

Dammit you Mayas or Inkas or whoever you were!

And before anyone accuses me of radicalism: the French already tried this in 1793.

Decimal time, 10 hours a day, 100 minutes an hour, official government decree.

It lasted about two years before Napoleon quietly let it die, mostly because clockmakers couldn’t retool fast enough and nobody wanted to buy a new watch.

I am not making that mistake twice - we ship the new clocks first, then mandate the switch.

Look How Easy This Is

Let’s do some campaign math. This is the whole pitch, really.

How many minutes is 8 and a half hours?

Old system: 8 * 60, plus half an hour, which is 30 minutes, so 8*60+30 = 510. Now do that in your head at a bus stop. Nobody can. Nobody has ever been able to.

Everyone claiming to is a liar.

New system: 8.5 hours. Move the decimal. 850. Bam. Math genie.

What percentage of the day is over at 5am?

Old system: 24/x = 5. Now fiddle with that for a bit, squint, do long division you haven’t done since school, and eventually arrive at “uh… a little less than a quarter, I guess.”

Nobody’s confident in that answer. Nobody should be.

New system: 3 new-hours have passed. 3 out of 10. 30%. BOOM. Math god.

I’m driving 100 km/h. How many m/s is that?

Old system: 27.8 m/s. Why. Why is it 27.8. Nobody asked for that number, nobody wants that number, I hate that number.

And it hates you. What is .8 anyway, can’t we at least use fractions?

New system: 10 m/s. Done. Easy. Clean. A number you can actually hold in your head while merging onto the highway.

And while we’re at it, campaign promises: the Autobahn Richtgeschwindigkeit goes up to 250. You’re welcome.

And Usain Bolt’s 100m world record, 9.58 seconds under the old broken system, becomes 11.14 seconds under the new one - still a world record, still absurdly fast, just measured in units a normal person can reason about.

Vote Die Wahre Zeit

That’s the manifesto.

Polls open whenever I get around to registering the party. Until then, keep your watches - we’ll get to those.