Product Manager: Is there an event in the staging environment that we can use for testing orders?

Stakeholder: [Out of his comfort zone because he’s taking over tasks that used to belong to his assistant and he doesn’t have a new assistant yet.]There’s an event for 6/9/2022 that still has tickets available.

[Today is 8/24/2022.]

PM: You do realize that the website doesn’t allow users to buy tickets for events that are in the past?

Took me more then a few minutes to figure the date format.

Murica.

@magicMirror lol

@magicMirror Well, it is one of the four least reasonable formats still consisting of year, month and day. The other three would be: YYYY/DD/MM, YY/DD/MM, MM/DD/YY.

Maybe the US changes to W/D/L in the future - where L would be the count of past legislative periods of the member state, W the count of completed weeks since the start of that period and D the day of the week.

@Oktokolo week numbering is the bane of my existence, when I try to convert to/from normal dates in my head every month's overflow accrues a day of error.

@lbfalvy Ditch the weeks and use day of year instead.

Fuck the US. Fuck the date formats that don’t follow a sequence. Fuck the imperial system.

@Oktokolo Actually, you made me realize that my real problem is months. They're not a unit, they're not the same length, but they're being treated as one.

@lbfalvy Years aren't constant length either.

@Oktokolo Also a problem but 1:365 is a much more tolerable error rate than 1:30.

@lbfalvy In my opinion, different month lengths are okay. But i don't get, why the February is always less than 30 days long.

But in the end, the current standard calendar is fine and YYYY-MM-DD is pretty human readable and still good for sorting. So i stick to that.

@Oktokolo The issue with years and days is inherent to our planet anyway so a complete solution isn't possible. I remember reading Isaac Asimov's description of a calendar with exactly 28-days long months, a single day per year (informally, the day between years) that isn't part of any month or week and a second similar day every four years. This calendar would make the weeks and months much easier to count and I personally find it much nicer, but it's a hack just like the current system.

@lbfalvy I guess, you love time zones then...

@Oktokolo I love reality. Logic would dictate UTC, but the reality is that having lunch at 2pm is so much more important than agreeing with someone in a different part of the world about the meaning of 2pm that even rockets are launched according to local time and not UTC.

@lbfalvy Fair enough - but what about daylight saving time ;)