Power outage

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(Power flashes for a fraction of a fraction of a second)
Appliances:

Its 12:00
Always has been!
(Also the universe was created last thursday. Have fun!)
- Elevators in the office building where I work have screens that run ads, but also have time and date in the corner. It resets every couple of days, so basically every day is in January 1970
  
  Casual ads inside an elevator in an office building? This is the true dystopian future
  I'd rather take the stairs (for up to ~10 floors)
- I always unplug my microwave because it's old and makes a soft humming noise. Obviously I don't bother to set the clock every time, so when it is plugged it usually shows --:--. However occasionally it indicates 12:00 instead, and I have no idea why it is sometimes different...
  
  My guess is that there's a capacitor in there somewhere. The capacitor stores enough charge to keep the time for short periods (like a power flicker). But it's unreliable for longer periods of time (beyond a few minutes) and will cause clock drift.
  So, when the power goes out for a medium length of time, the microwave resets to 12:00 to indicate that you need to set the time again
  However, if the microwave is left unplugged for an extended period of time (a few days to weeks), the capacitor is fully drained. My guess is that this causes the time to be set to --:--
  Why it would be designed like that? No idea
- Ah, a fellow lastthursdayism believer
- 0:00 -:-- 0:00 -:--

Does anybody really know what time it is?
- Does anybody really care?
  
  Only that one teacher who cared if you walked in one second late but would then keep the whole class after the bell because they think they're above not only all the kids but all the other teachers as well.
  
  If so, I can't imagine why
- Here ya go: https://time.gov/
- Some physicists think they do. I have heard two different ideas though both summarise to "time is a side effect of the universe operating
  
  The real caveat there may be: which time dimension:-).
- Yeah, Atomic Clocks can measure time with great precision as the radioactive decay of elements is extremely consistent.

Wrong:
Pizza-time
Lazy-time
Caffeine-addiction-time

Hope I'm not alone in this - Appliances should only have relative timers.
It only needs to know how to run a program for 30 min, or activate with a delayed start in 5h. Clock time is meaningless for an oven.
Appliance companies, are you listening? Hint: they're not, circuitry design and manufacture has been outsourced so much they probably don't even know where they get it from.
- Yeah — stop making me reset the god damn oven, microwave, and coffee maker every time the power flickers. At the very least my coffee maker has a small battery in it that seems to endure shorter outages, but if manufacturers aren’t willing to have a back up battery for this, then they should take out the god damn clock altogether. It’s mostly pointless— especially these days. My microwave is so tedious too — it asks the day, month, and year. Why does my microwave need to know the fucking date? It actually serves no purpose.
- "I want this to finish at 6PM" can be easier maths than 11h 15m from now.

The power almost never goes out at my house, which is nice, but there are 4 appliances with clocks in my kitchen. The microwave runs fast and is usually about 12 minutes ahead every time the clocks change, the stove is always rock solid, the coffee pot is never set (despite being the only appliance with a timer mode that would actually be useful), and the air fryer is only accurate during summer because I can’t remember how to set it (and I don’t care enough to fix it).
- I just got a coffee pot with no timer, just an on/off switch. (Because it also has no black plastic, even the filter holder.) I never needed a timer, but now I do have to be aware the keep-hot plate will stay on until I turn it off, instead of self-stopping after 2 hours.
- The only clock I bother setting is the stove
  There is really no (functional) reason to have more than a single clock within a single room
- My rice cooker is the cockroach of timekeeping. It was unplugged for almost a year and the clock was still on and accurate when I pulled it out of storage.

So many timers, so little time.
I don't even notice all the little clocks. I actually like clocks a lot, and I check them a lot, but not the ones in these appliances. I usually don't notice when they run fast or when we go in or out of DLS.
- Sometimes my friend fixes mine when he's here. I appreciate it. It bothers him. I don't care about any of them except the auto feeder for the cats.

Jokes on you, my oven has WiFi.
- Some kid in Hoboken is gonna set your house on fire with it.
  
  Good thing you can only turn it on remotely under certain conditions

Me: this is so dumb
Also me: busts out laughing

Power cut off at my house while I was at work night before last. Got the notification of restoration bout an hour before quitting time
- We gotta love the little blessings.

We have a constellation of satellites constantly broadcasting the most accurate time humans can measure and it's crazy every device doesn't have an antenna to pick this up and set the time.
- nope, but they do have WiFi to send analytics to the factory (and so that they can get hacked and be used for DDOS attacks)
  
  A DDOS attack on my toaster would be quite dangerous actually, what's the cybersecurity framework to secure my toaster
- Most of these are in a metal box, which blocks signal. Adding careful routing to get an antenna in an unshrouded position where it's still physically protected is a pain. Also, in the middle of an apartment building can give you pretty terrible reception in the first place.
  GPS doesn't provide time zones or daylight savings info. The appliance would know where you are and what UTC time it is, but not which time zone you're in. The manufacturer could pre-program shape files in (yay, more memory) but they become obsolete the next time a politician decides to move time zones or change daylight savings. If this happens to you, your device will keep repeatedly changing to be an hour fast/slow no matter how often you reset it. You could have the GPS satellites continually broadcast shape files for the time zone but this would be a big change, use up a lot of the limited bandwidth, and it would take your clock half an hour to set itself.
  it's like an extra $5-10 in parts and unlike a WiFi module, the manufacturer can't make any big data or ad revenue from it.

Idk maybe, just maybe. Add a cheap AF coin battery like for example motherboards to keep the internal clock alive.
Epic trick dear manufacturers. Well maybe it will cost them 0.05€ more per device... That means less Ferraris for the CEOs so idk about that.

None of my kitchen equipment has any sort of a clock on them.
Timers, yes. Clocks, no.

Yeah stopped bothering with setting up the hour manually for these things... Every rainy or windy season my electricity is quite erratic.

Imagine this... let's all carry around pocket computers that sync with atomic clocks, they can the use low power radios to set cheap clocks... cough... bluetooth current time service... cough...

It’s whatever you want it to be

TBH I never set them. Whats the point?

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