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“the company and its streaming service will wind down with the end of the decade, on December 31st, 2019” Years started being numbered at 1 so the decade ends
by ianai 7y ago
“the company and its streaming service will wind down with the end of the decade, on December 31st, 2019”
Years started being numbered at 1 so the decade ends on December 31 2020.
- narsil 7y agoWell that's a technicality. There's no reason to base practical realities of Jan 1 2020 being the start of the "2020s" with the fact that Year 0 was missing. I recall a CNN article recently about this: https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/21/us/when-does-the-decade-end-begin-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/21/us/when-does-the-decade-end-b... > Those technicalities, however, don't change the fact that as a society, we seem to have collectively determined that decades begin in years ending in zero and end on years ending in nine.
- petercooper 7y agoIt's not even a technicality, really. A decade is any span of ten years, and in modern English we refer to decades by their tens digit. If someone wanted to talk about the 202nd decade or something, then sure, that'd end next year, but instead we merely talk about the 60s, 90s, or whatever. Calendar shifts in the interim even make the "technical" approach a bit of a farce, though.
- ascorbic 7y agoThat argument was lost 20 years ago next week I'm afraid
- bchanudet 7y agoIt's worth noting that ISO 8601:2004 actually defines 1BC as Year 0 – mostly to keep the leap years algorithm correct for negative years. With a zero-based numbering system it makes sense to consider the decade to be ending in 3 days.
- loraa 7y agoWhatever makes life easier for easier people.
- petercooper 7y agoWhile millennia and centuries are numbered ordinally (e.g. the 18th century or 2nd millennium), in modern speech decades are not numbered ordinally, they're declared based upon the tens digit (e.g. 60s, 80s, or 90s), so your point is false.
- mobilemidget 7y agoI just think the 5 day notice with 10 year running is a bit short notice.
- Zarath 7y agoWhat? No. If Y2K was the beginning of a new millennium then Jan 1 2020 is the beginning of a new decade.
- scarmig 7y agoSomeone clearly did not pay much attention in 1999 to the incessant pedantry that the new millennium didn't really start until 2001.