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Dr. Dan Killam

Image description: a diagram showing how most of the world's countries use day-month-year. China, Japan, Korea and Iran are absolutely based and use YMD. Meanwhile the US derps out and uses MDY. These are portrayed as stacking blocks, with two of them being orderly pyramids, and the US's insanity being apparent in the unwieldy midsized month block on top balancing on the small pointy day block.

4 comments
GoatsLive

@dantheclamman I guess because I lived in Japan at a formidable age, I use YMD myself, especially when naming photos for upload and storage. Today's example 20220819.jpg

Mx. Savanni D'Gerinel

@GoatsLive @dantheclamman i just YMD because it automatically sorts things reasonably without me doing anything.

FediThing

@GoatsLive @dantheclamman

YMD is handy on files because you can always sort them in date order even if you use alphabetical order.

Sometimes the datestamps on files get changed by all kinds of operating system weirdness but the file names stay the same.

Roberto M.F.

@dantheclamman The fact that people in non-YMD cultures are adopting YMD because "it's handy" in a digital age (myself included) just proves how volatile consensus is. It's nothing to do with logic but with #linguistics: North American people (including Canadians here on purpose) adopted that probably because at that moment it was natural to write dates the way they spoke and thought about them.

That doesn't mean I don't hate it when I face one of those out, of course!

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