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> A one-day “world holiday” between the final Saturday of the year and Sunday, Jan. 1, would bring the total number of days to 365. I was thinking to myself I
by kccqzy 3y ago
> A one-day “world holiday” between the final Saturday of the year and Sunday, Jan. 1, would bring the total number of days to 365.
I was thinking to myself I liked this idea until I saw this. So there are days that now do not belong to a week. I cannot imagine how much special casing this would require.
> “A ‘month’ does not mean anything,” they wrote. “A day means something. A year means something. But a month?”
Then by the same logic the week needs to be abolished. Then the problem above wouldn't exist. Now tell that to the religions.
- phire 3y agoOn the plus side, every day of the month would always be the same day. The 1st would always be a Sunday, the 25th would always be a Thursday, etc.
- yardstick 3y agoPeople would hate having their birthdays always on the same day, imagine if it was always a Tuesday. Never a weekend. Sure, celebrations can still be held on weekends, but it’s just not the same. And Fri 13th would die away.
- lostlogin 3y agoI want to know what the bonus day gets called.
- kbenson 3y agoJust call it the bonus day. I'm sure the equivalent of all the leap year babies that get to call themselves bonus babies will thank us.
- speed_spread 3y ago"Great leaders day" because those born that day are destined to rule.
- fragmede 3y agoCaturday?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- BossingAround 3y agoNah, the opposite is true for me. If I know for sure it's always a Tue, I can plan around it. I can schedule PTO for Mon and Tue, and have a nice long weekend, for example. What's so frustrating to me is when I realize that, for example, public holiday falls on the weekend (I know this is solved by some countries by moving the holiday to Monday or Friday). Last year, 24th of Dec was a Saturday, pretty much the worst time for Christmas.
- lolinder 3y agoWhere do you live where they don't move the holidays when they're on a weekend? I'd assumed that was the norm everywhere.
- rbaudibert 3y agoWe don't move them in Brazil. I'm fairly sure they aren't moved in any other South American country either. Same for Portugal/Germany. I guess we don't need to move them because we have plenty anyway, compared to the few ones the Americans have.
- happymellon 3y agoWe move them in the UK, and get more holidays than the Americans.
- evandijk70 3y agoNot GP, but The Netherlands do not move their holidays when they're on a weekend.
- YokoZar 3y agoAbsolutely nothing is preventing you from celebrating your birthday the way we do Holidays. My birthday isn't September 22, it's the third Saturday in September. Heck it's not even weird to not bother with this redefinition and just have a party on a more convenient day.
- gameman144 3y agoIn this calendar system, though, the third Saturday in September would always be the same day of the week, so it would keep you from celebrating in that format.
- kelnos 3y agoThere's nothing preventing that, sure, but I don't think I'd really enjoy that. I want to celebrate my birthday on the anniversary of the day I was born, not on the nearest weekend day. (My birthday falls on a national holiday where I live, though, so in practice I've never had to worry about school or work on my birthday.)
- jackhalford 3y agoIt would actually be Friday 13th every month, if start the month on a Sunday.
- RecycledEle 3y agoThat's not a reason to prefer one calendar over another. Celebrating the anniversary of your birth is an arbitrary decision. Preferring it to fall on a weekend is odf. Anyone can celebrate anything at any time.
- maxerickson 3y agoYeah, people should just turn off their inate psychology more often.
- beede 3y agoFriday the 13th would always come on a Saturday, is all.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- NullPrefix 3y agoAlways friday the 13th
- yardstick 3y agoWhich would be boring compared to it only happening once in a proverbial blue moon.
- majewsky 3y agoSurely everyone would follow the correct rule instead and have the week start on Mondays. :)
- stavros 3y agoThe Greek word for Monday literally means "second day". Tuesday is "third day", up to Thursday, "fifth day".
- noahjk 3y agoWhile I subscribe to the Monday week start, that’s a really interesting fact that I never would have expected
- dbcurtis 3y agoThor, God of Thunder, would like to have a word with you.
- sk0g 3y agoSimilar for Georgian, Monday through to Thursday are named roughly "two-Sabbath" to "five-Sabbath", with Saturday being Sabbath of course. Not sure why those numbers, but I assumed it was because it was the number of days past Saturday? Friday and Sunday get different names, unrelated to Sabbath as far as I can tell -- paraskevi and kvira.
- netsharc 3y agoThe weekdays currently act as a weak parity check.. if I said "let's have a meeting on Tuesday 12/8" you'd double check because December 8th isn't a Tuesday. The weak parity didn't prevent a friend from booking a rental car in April although we were going to be in the destination city in July.. the days of the week matched!
- valianteffort 3y agoChanging the calendar in general seems stupid. The gregorian calendar is already well established simple to understand. What benefit does changing it actually bring? More importantly the US should switch to the metric system.
- sophacles 3y agoThere's a really high poe factor here.... Like your arguments against changing the calendar to something more rational are the same arguments a lot of US folks use to justify not switching to the metric system. Well played.
- sneak 3y agoThe US already switched to the metric system in 1988. https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/metrication-law https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/metrication-law 15 USC § 205b https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/205b https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/205b
- kelnos 3y agoYour use of "switched" is leaving out a lot of nuance. Metric is by law preferred for trade and commerce, but what to actually use is left up to each individual and business, and individuals and business don't need to actually care about this law.
- cowsandmilk 3y ago> importantly the US should switch to the metric system Why switch to a system that is widely agreed to be worse for normal human communication than the one we have. Fahrenheit is far superior of a system, where 0 to 100 roughly reflects the range of temperatures one might expect in the lower 48. When you are outside that range, you know you’re in for very uncomfortable weather. Celsius doesn’t give much benefit beyond the vague water will freeze around 0. And then we get to distance. The US has a system where a foot is divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6. Metric is only divisible by 5 or 2. It is horrid if you need to divide things in thirds.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lostlogin 3y ago> I cannot imagine how much special casing this would require. Someone who administered a scheduling system for flight crew was telling me how hard it is. Multiple time zones, contracts, unions, jurisdictions, companies and staff roles (which require frequent recertification) etc. Imagine handling a bonus day in this context. It does not sound good.
- phs318u 3y agoI have tried explaining some of this complexity to people when discussing Y2K (usually them rolling their eyes at the naked cash grab by overpaid consultants and me arguing that while there clearly was a gold-rush there were also real problems that got fixed which was why the stuff wasn't breaking left, right and centre).
- snapplebobapple 3y agoI know right? Lets skip all this stupid special casing nonsense and just make each new second in this calendar equal to ~1.002747253 current seconds. Extra day solved! If we start this on the day equivalent to January 1 in the current calendar my plan has the added benefit of drastically reducing skin cancer by making 8 am on July 1 of the new calendar roughly equivalent to 8 pm in the current calendar. Can't get sun induced skin cancer if you aren't awake enough to be in the sun all summer!
- rvbissell 3y agoThat's great, until the sun rises at 0330
- qntmfred 3y agoYou'll get used to it. We all will.
- snapplebobapple 3y agoYou aren't thinking about this right. Instead of worrying about the sun rising at 0330, worry about how you are going to build enough blackout blind factories to profit from the obvious solution to not writing thousands of lines of code.
- snickerer 3y agoLet's just drop time zones. Then noon is not at 12 o'clock in most parts of the world ... who cares? The sun will rise at your place not at 6 or 7 but at maybe 11 or 17 or 23. I would love it, humanity would have the same time all over the planet. I think it is a silly tradition from medieval times to expect 12 to be high noon.
- robrtsql 3y agoThis famous writeup quickly convinced me that this wouldn't work very well: https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
- chrchr 3y agoIt's really not that difficult compared to what we have now. In our current system, there's one hour a year that happens twice and one that gets skipped. It's a weird special case, but we manage.
- theK 3y agoBadly, we manage badly. I have wasted hundreds of hours debugging. Other people's code and writing involved workarounds because the team couldn't resist using "standard" ISO timestamps instead of the much more "arrow of time" like numeric offset (like Unix time)...
- patrickthebold 3y agoHow are iso timestamps a problem? You need a time zone of course. Usually people stick to UTC. But it's trivial to convert iso timestamps to unixtime so it's hard to imagine how one would have more bugs.
- explaininjs 3y ago> How are iso timestamps a problem? You need a time zone of course. You answered your own question in the following sentence - ISO 8601 timestamps do not require a time zone, and infer "local time" if none is provided.
- kamray23 3y agoISO 8601 timestamps do require a time zone when it is relevant. You can only use non-offset timestamps if "local time" is constant. If your time zone varies, you cannot use non-offset timestamps. Your choices are to choose a single tz and stick to it (in which case offsets should be used to clarify for humans), use UTC (which is probably the simplest option since you're sticking with one tz to begin with) or use offsets properly, marking the current timezone on all of them. Trying to use "local time" in places with DST is like trying to build a bridge out of paper. For this reason, most people either use UTC time or they use offset timezones for timestamps. The latter is nicer for humans who like understanding when things happened in terms other than hundreds of millions of seconds since 1970, but more complex to implement. Using standard ISO timestamps is good. The reason why people would like to use them is because they sort well, they parse everywhere, and they're human-readable. That last reason is the main and really only reason why you would prefer it to a Unix timestamp. They're standard, but they're a standard for how to communicate things in a human-readable manner. If you wanted to just store accurate time, store a binary 128-bit fixed-point long instead of using UTF-8, since it doesn't need to be human-readable.
- water-data-dude 3y agoWould it be better or worse than saving up seven of them until you can have a NULLWEEK?
- gpvos 3y agoA useful suggestion, definitely worth considering. But having a year that is seven days longer would complicate business and taxes, which was the main reason for the regular calendar. Also, dates might get too much out of sync with things like the equinox for some religious tastes.
- eep_social 3y agoExcept it’s really 1.24 extra per year which is what all that leap year stuff is about.
- Grimblewald 3y agoUnless we go full lunar, then its a few minutes every couple decades.
- masklinn 3y ago> Now tell that to the religions. Most religions deal by having their own religious calendar. That the civil calendar is the Christian one is not a requirement.
- stvltvs 3y agoBut if your sabbath falls on on a Tuesday this year, Monday next year, etc. it's going to cause lots of trouble with store hours, work weeks, school schedules, and so on.
- masklinn 3y agoHow is that any more the general society's problem than dealing with other religious events, especially "moving" ones like Holi or Ramadan?
- dragonwriter 3y agoFor much of the world, one or more religious groups with a fixed weekly holy day constitute the bulk of general society.
- renewiltord 3y agoWell, I suppose "How is your new datetime scheme our problem?" and "we have the numbers and we're not changing".
- mensetmanusman 3y agoBecause the religious make up a majority of society (and it is apparently only going to grow due to secularism failing to pass on the idea that having more than one kid matters).
- anoncow 3y agoSecularism should not have to depend on number of children to grow. The idea is good enough and will find traction in children born to any religion.
- fragmede 3y agoAh, yes, the "programming it's too hard, let's go shopping!" school of thought. Visionaries at companies like Google and Apple are known for their "ugh, special cases!?" approach to not finishing Jira tickets, which is why they are where they are today.
- kccqzy 3y agoI did not suggest special cases in programming. Consider special cases in business, logistics. Mundane things like quarterly reports.
- anon84873628 3y agoAll those gronky special cases prevent big brain Platonist from hear music of spheres perfection in code
- equalsione 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar
- robertlagrant 3y ago> Then by the same logic the week needs to be abolished A week means 7 days.
- RecycledEle 3y agoI love this proposed system. Every month is 4 weeks long, or 28 days long. (I'm not sure how it handles leap year.)
- jhbadger 3y agoThe French Republican calendar (used by the Revolutionary government in France in the 1790s and early 1800s before Napoleon abolished it as he did most revolutionary innovations) had a similar system of 5 or 6 holidays outside any "week" (technically "decades", as they used 10 day blocs as part of the same base 10 obsession that led to the metric system) or month called the "Sansculottides". It apparently worked fine. The main drawback was the 10-day week as workers only got off on one day in 10 rather than 1 in 7 (weekends weren't a thing then and people normally only got off on Sundays). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar
- c-linkage 3y agoIf the calendar had been adopted 100 years ago, you probably wouldn't care about the intercalary day.