When does a new day begin?

The title is the post. Did anybody anticipate the Great Depression? Sure, in retrospect it seems obvious, but hindsight is always 20/20. Weren’t there any economists, businessmen or anybody at all who saw what was coming?

I ask because my mother told us kids that our grandfather somehow saw the writing on the wall. He quit his railroad job, withdrew all his savings and liquidated all his substantial property (which wasn’t much, he was just another working stiff with maybe an eighth grade education) and moved his family from Atlanta to a small farm in Cobb County north of Marietta, which back then was way out in the sticks. They grew their own food. Even then, they had hard times when the stock market crashed. They had to pinch every penny 'til it screamed, they patched and re-patched their clothes, and sometimes they resorted to barter when there simply wasn’t any money–but they never went hungry. My mom used to joke that they were the best fed naked people in the world.

So the thing that puzzles me is

@Chumba_Wumba Your post seems to have been cut off.

He was knocked down

But he’ll get up again

Will we ever keep him down?

Off the top of my head, midnight is the usual beginning of a new day. The time 00:00 at the beginning of the day to 24:00 at the end (which is coterminous with 00:00 of the next day). Astronomers use noon as the start of the day, but I don’t how they record (-12:00 to 12:00)?

Various cultures use sunset or dawn to mark a new day, but scientific precision is less important for them.

That’s really not what he’s asking. The OP is cutoff, so we didn’t get his full question, but he’s clearly asking something about metaphorical days.

Wall Street indexes predicted nine out of the last five recessions! – Paul Samuelson

Lots of people predict major events constantly. By chance, some of them are correct. But whether that’s repeatable or supported is another story.

Actually I’ve been wondering myself. Why doesn’t the day officially begin @ our 6 am time? As in roughly when the sun rises? By contrast nothing special happens at midnight.

It’s explicitly what they’re asking:

Everything after that is clearly an accidental copy and paste.

Nowadays they express parts of the day using decimals: for example, JD 2441778.024

Blame the 1884 Meridian Conference… [ETA the concept of the civil calendar day starting at midnight, as opposed to nautical and astronomical days, was already extant, though!]

Yeah. Unlike noon, which is directly observed when the sun is at its highest, there’s no way to directly know when it’s midnight. You need to have a sophisticated understanding of the stars or a timing mechanism to know when it’s midnight.

Sunset and dawn are directly observable, but float with respect to each other and noon. Not a problem for a preindustrial culture, but extra complication if you want uniform timing.

Btw scientists and others do nowadays want uniform timing, which is why they use atomic clocks rather than try to observe the sky for that.

I’m going to close this thread until @Chumba_Wumba returns to tell the mods what the goal was. Maybe the title should have been “when she’s a new era begin?” Maybe it was an accidental paste. Maybe the whole post was an accident. Maybe the account has been hacked by a bot.

@Chumba_Wumba, you can’t post again because I’ve closed the thread, but if you report any post and click “something else” you can tell the mods what you want done.