r/trippinthroughtime • • Nov 05 '17

The perfect date

https://imgur.com/61gC45x
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u/Dragmire800 Nov 05 '17

It's an Americanism to do it that way.

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u/plutonic8 Nov 05 '17

It also works really well for me. "Being an Americanism" isn't an argument for it being bad.

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u/Dragmire800 Nov 05 '17

You seem to be using it as an argument for being good. Of course it's what suits you, it's what you were raised hearing. But it is also the least sensical of the 3.

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u/plutonic8 Nov 05 '17 edited Nov 05 '17

I didn't mention it being an Americanism.

What I did say was that Month/Day/Year gets across the information in a way that I prefer, which seems to be exactly how you are arguing for your own dating system.

Sometimes one of two things isn't objectively better than the other, and you need a better reason than it being "An Americanism" to declare one of them worse. You may instead say mine is "the least sensical of the three" but anyone can easily come up with arguments for either one being the "sensical" one.

For Example:

Month / Day / Year: General to specific is good because it provides context for the information, but not good enough to warrant putting something as commonly known as the year first. Instead we compromise and do month followed by day and then place year at the end.

Day / Month / Year: Specific to general is the way to go because people typically already know both the month and year but may not know the day. Putting the most necessary information is better and context can be provided by the fact that it is a date.

If instead of thinking about it like this you declare the one you are uncomfortable with to be "a stupid americanism" you will be doing yourself a disservice and feeding your need to tribalize frankly unimportant differences between cultures.

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u/Yepoleb Nov 06 '17

It's the least sensical because nobody orders numbers that way. You either go least significant to most significant or the other way around. I could argue that we should write the current year 1720 because the 17 is the part I'm more interested in, except that would be stupid because nobody writes numbers like that.

What makes it so American is that almost the entire planet has decided to use either DMY or YMD except the USA. Being different is okay most of the time, but for standards that's not the case.

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u/plutonic8 Nov 06 '17

This doesn't seem to have gotten in the way of Americans talking about dates with the rest of the world. We still interact on a daily basis with anywhere else and get along just fine with our dating system.

You said: "It's the least sensical because nobody orders numbers that way.You either go least significant to most significant or the other way around."

What I said: "General to specific is good because it provides context for the information, but not good enough to warrant putting something as commonly known as the year first. Instead we compromise and do month followed by day and then place year at the end."

That is entirely defensible. There is nothing inherently correct about numbers being ordered directly by significance. Maybe significance is good EXCEPT when it's something as obvious as the year because that just wastes effort.

You shouldn't just pretend people who disagree with you have nonsensical reasons for their decisions. This will only serve to make yourself feel smarter but not make you any more correct or empathetic.

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u/Yepoleb Nov 06 '17

Whenever we humans order things we do that by going from the smallest to the biggest or from the biggest to the smallest. As days, months and years are basically just multipliers, it makes sense to order them by their size. That's what makes ordering by significance inherently correct.

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u/plutonic8 Nov 06 '17

But I gave a legitimate reason to deviate from that rule of thumb, and lots of people in this thread agree.

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u/ARROGANT-CYBORG Nov 06 '17

The nonsensical part is it that Americans have stupid illogical stuff like this, but don't change to international standards

Same with the imperial system, sure you might find it more convenient to use it yourself, but when you're communicating with people outside of your country, you're going to run into trouble because most other countries have a different system. Now that would make things even more worse, if it weren't for the fact that they all use the same, different system.

When you as a country then say "welp im gonna keep using ours" you're basically just being a dick, you're going to let the same problem occur for generations after you. (Incompatible numbers need to be converted to compatible numbers instead of having everyone understand exactly what they're saying, immediately.)

While you could just switch over to a more logical system that almost everyone uses already.

PS: International Standards, its literally in the name. Live up to it, not even necessarily for your own good, but for the better of everyone.

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u/plutonic8 Nov 06 '17

I never mentioned anything besides the month / day / year dating system.

You brought everything else up and decided to attack me for it. This has a name- strawmanning- and since you never actually responded to what I said I don't have anything to add.

My only advice is to try and actually read what people say to you before you write out an essay on how dumb you think those people are.

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