[discreditable]

Reminds me of one of my favorite posts from back in 2013: You advocate a ____ approach to calendar reform: https://qntm.org/calendar

Specifically (omitting a lot for brevity) :

    You advocate a

    ( ) solar ( ) lunar (x) lunisolar

    approach to calendar reform. Your idea will not work. Here is why:

    (x) solar years are real and the calendar year needs to sync with them
    (x) solar days are real and the calendar day needs to sync with them
    (x) the solar year cannot be evenly divided into solar days
    (x) having one or two days per year which are part of no month is stupid
    (x) your name for the thirteenth month is questionable
    (x) the solar year cannot be evenly divided into seven-day weeks

    Specifically, your plan fails to account for:

    (x) rational hatred for arbitrary change
    (x) unpopularity of weird new month and day names

    and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

    (x) good luck trying to move the Fourth of July
    (x) the history of calendar reform is insanely complicated and no amount of further calendar reform can make it simpler

    Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

    (x) sorry, but I don't think it would work

[bombcar]

> having one or two days per year which are part of no month is stupid

This is perhaps the weakest of the objections, it has been done and it could be doable, if we wanted it.

But nobody really cares.

[resoluteteeth]

> This is perhaps the weakest of the objections, it has been done and it could be doable, if we wanted it.

It's not at all a weak objection. I mean, sure, months are arbitrary in the first place and it's not physically impossible to set up a system where there are days outside of months. A system set up that way might not be any more complicated than our current system since it would simplify other aspects of dates. But making that change would fundamentally break a lot of our assumptions about dates in ways that would require a ton of effort to fix (good luck getting any existing software dealing with dates to work properly after that) for very little benefit, so it's an incredibly bad idea.

The article also says that the extra days wouldn't even be assigned days of the week, which is even worse.

[kevincox]

Getting existing software to change is equivalent to the general switching cost problem which is the real argument.

Software modeling would be easy. For software it is an additional month with only 1 or 2 days. However because it would be a holiday most humans wouldn't need to talk about it as a month.

[resoluteteeth]

> Software modeling would be easy. For software it is an additional month with only 1 or 2 days.

You will also have to consider actions that are performed on the first of the month and possibly special case these months. This also means that effectively you have just made the length of months even more variable and confusing.

It's really only "easy" in the sense that it is possible to fit it into existing date data structures, but it's not necessarily that "easy" in terms of updating business logic.

> However because it would be a holiday most humans wouldn't need to talk about it as a month.

It can't be a holiday for everyone and it will still need to be something that people think about. Hospitals, fire departments, police, and websites that are expected to operate 24/7 will still need to operate and handle the special day. It will probably also need to be a new special case in literally every contract (leases, employment contracts, billing terms, etc.).

The human aspects are perhaps even harder than the computer aspects because it won't be possible to simply think of it as a 1 day month, it will HAVE to be special cased.

The original article also said that the extra day would not be assigned a day of the week. This is even more confusing. Currently, every 7 days is one week regardless of years, but if this change is made, for any action that needs to be performed once every seven days, either a decision will have to be made on whether 1) to perform/not perform the action on the special day depending on what day it WOULD have been if it wasn't the special day and then shift the day of the week for the next year, or 2) allow an interval of 8-9 days once a year.

Even though there is currently a slight inconvenience from 1) months having different numbers of days and 2) days of the week not being the same every month, these reflect the realities that months are arbitrary and don't match up to solar years/days.

The proposed change is actually arguably worse because it has to add even more complexity in the form of edge cases to try to pretend these problems don't exist.

[powerhour]

7 day weeks is up there, too. I'm sure we could get used to 5 day weeks.

[somat]

a week is just a quarter month... or that is, it should be a quarter month. months as a time unit are several sorts of screwed up. my advise, if you can get away with it, is to never use months in your accounting.

[evanb]

Billions of people celebrate religious observances every 7th day.

[elmomle]

It would be better to make it a special month. Nicer for people born on those days than being born on the Unmonth.

[function_seven]

Nah. "My birthday transcends your small-minded definition of 'months'. I was born outside of time. I'm above it."

Excel would throw a fit, but I propose that numeric date formats handle these unmonthed days as follows:

US-en: __/01/1989, GB-en: 01-__-1989, ISOish: 1989-01-__

That Javascript format: Blessed ___ 01 1989 15:42:03 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

[fredophile]

Would being born on the unmonth day be any worse than being born on Feb 29?

[867-5309]

>the Unmonth

like the Giliacs!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orville_(season_2)#ep17

[jonathankoren]

Be glad La Terreur is over.

Today is nonidi 9 Fructidor in the year of the Republic CCXXX, celebrating liquorice, you churlish counter revolutionary!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar

Twitter bot that tells you day https://twitter.com/sansculotides

[gerikson]

The revolutionary calendar is separate from the Terror. In fact, it survived it by quite some time, being abolished by Napoleon in An XII.

[jonathankoren]

I’m pretty sure Robespierre would take offense to the characterizations of the revolutionary calendar.

But whatever dude. Don’t lose your head over it.

[charlieyu1]

Lunisolar calendar is used by Asians for centuries.

[twunde]

My god. I literally had the argument from https://qntm.org/abolish during standup.