Comment on Jesse is smarter than what we give him credit for.
reverendsteveii@lemm.ee 11 months agoso it’s still full of arbitrary bullshit? “we’ll just have a day that doesn’t count every year and another day that doesn’t count every 4 years except when the year is divisible by 100”.
the idea here is that this system is more intuitive than our own, but it’s not.
The problem is that the earth doesn’t orbit around the sun in a whole # of days. A sidereal year is 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes and 10 seconds, or 365.256 days.
Likewise, the moon doesn’t orbit the earth in a perfect whole # of days either. The moon takes 27.3 days.
then, as I said to the last person who pointed this out even though my math implies that I already know it, why this new bullshit instead of the bullshit we’ve already implemented?
Ultraviolet@lemmy.world 11 months ago
No system can avoid arbitrary bullshit because the earth doesn’t go around the sun in an amount of time that’s an exact multiple of the time it takes to rotate.
reverendsteveii@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Sounds like why fuck with it then. There’s a cost to converting that will be paid only to replace one set of arbitrary bullshit with another set of arbitrary bullshit. You can say you prefer one bullshit to another and no one can dispute you on that, but in the end it’s just one set of bullshit vs another and I’m already committed to the current one.
Ultraviolet@lemmy.world 11 months ago
It’s probably too difficult to implement now because of computers being entrenched in the existing system. If we were going to implement it, it would have been 100 years ago.
Malfeasant@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Same issue with a dozenal number system…
_Mantissa@lemmy.world 11 months ago
There are pros and cons to every alternative calendar. Just as there are pros and cons to the metric system, hybrid cars, and renewable energy. There is a short term cost to switching to better systems and a long term reward. The earlier we switch, the more reward we reap. Not saying that 13 months is the best alternative but the reasoning of systemic changes hinges on being willing to front costs that we know will be worth it in the long run. Our current one is not causing enough issues and it’s upfront cost to switch is too high so we will likely not even seriously consider changing it for a long time. But we can still acknowledge that we should use a better system and that adapting earlier will only benefit us in the long run.
reverendsteveii@lemm.ee 11 months ago
What is actually better about it? It’s a bit more intuitive except for where it isn’t, and it forces people to develop an entirely new concept of the 0th of January (and occasionally 0th of June). What do we do on the 0th? How does that fit into things that cycle with a period of 1 month? It breaks the idea that a 1 month period is equivalent to a 4 week period, which is supposed to be the entirety of why we’re doing this in the first place.