Aren't your complaints the explicit goal of that date format? It's supposed to trip people up for a second to get them think about years with a different expon

Aren't your complaints the explicit goal of that date format? It's supposed to trip people up for a second to get them think about years with a different exponent on the floating-poibt/scientific-notation representation our brains fall into using pretty much all of the time. And that in this context there is no true 'appropriate' time besides maybe an emergency situation where understanding on a hard real time latency is paramount. Basically you might have more success when your reasoning for stopping doesn't also coincide with why someone might be doing it in the first place.