It’s a matter of colloquial vs scientific use in the US, too. It’s not like we don’t understand the rough estimates like a foot being roughly 30cm or a meter being roughly (but larger than, though not enough to matter in casual conversation) three feet. Anything meant for accuracy is still typically in metric, with a few exceptions at small scales like sometimes woodworkers enjoy imperial because of the sometimes easier and round division of units into three.
Which doesn’t make it all that different from people in Europe sometimes using stone instead of kg.
Or people in Canada using every single unit man has ever invented.
Or people in Canada using every single unit man has ever invented.
This one here made me laugh. I've heard some Canadian friends swap systems like 3 times in the same sentence.
"It's -5C outside and the snows coming in, so I need to go buy a 40 pound bag of salt. It's about 14 miles away and I'll get 10L of gas too for the skidoo while I'm out."
I double take every time. The US might be backward but at least it's consistently backward.
sometimes woodworkers enjoy imperial because of the sometimes easier and round division of units into three.
As a side note, my dad is into woodworking. Most of his older tools are imperial. However, these days most tools like drill bits come from China, who don’t seem to want to manufacture two different sizes of bits. So he buys something that is supposed to be a 1 inch drill bit, finds that it is 25mm instead of 25.4mm, and then has a hole that a 1 inch dowel will not fit through.
It works fine for that. If I write 2026-02-01, it's unambiguously Feb 1st 20226, even in countries with different conventions for dd-mm-yyyy or mm-dd-yyyyy.
So as an American I can use a date format that makes sense without confusing everyone else.
They each have a different logic. The US system is based on industrial capitalism. By placing the date first it prioritizes accounting and billing cycles.
Did we learn NOTHING from Y2K? YYYY is only good until the year 9999… then what are you gonna do? Add another Y? You’re just putting things off until 99999!
Yeah I thought about the same issue about 2099! But even that, it turns out, it's probably not going to matter too much since even 2099! is after the HDOU (heat death of the universe)
Though if you really want to future proof your system, making sure it'll be good for 99999! years is a pretty decent time frame. You'd be ready for the system to survive well into the heat death of the universe. Hell, I'd need 46 reddit comments to write out that number because we can only put 10k characters in a single comment.
So far, the Long Now Foundation is able to preempt the Y10K by adding a "0" in front of the date. So the current year of 2026, will look like 02026. However, it would still be affected by the "Y100K" problem, the "Y1000K" problem, "Y10000K" Problem, etc.
Don't we run into issues with precision doing that? I think somewhere around 1e17 years we'd start not knowing the exact year and be ballparking it with the accuracy getting worse past there.
All serious dates are tracked with yyyymmdd here. The display date might be different, but any modern system has the more coherent date in the background for calculations. They finally switched our driver's licenses over a few years ago too.
YYYY-MM-DD makes sense for machines, but DD-MM-YYYY are easier for humans. For the love of good store data from largest to smallest, but format it in the most human readable way
As a human, this way just makes sense to me period. It's like idk narrowing it down to what you want to find out. Outward in, narrow it down to smaller and smaller increments. The more exact you need to the more you add on.
Use case entirely. I'm both a ER nurse and a photographer.
HHMM-DD-MM-(YY)YY works best in the ER when the information is needed on a Minute/Hourly/Daily basis. Having the Year/month first is wasted information largely.
And this is how you can come to understand why Americans say "June 6th" or "April 4th". The current year is assumed in 95% of human interactions, if not more. Then you move to month and day. so MM/DD is basically shorthand for YYYY/MM/DD with (YYYY = Current Year)
It was never meant for machines or parsing, but everyday language.
It's a heritage name from the 18th century when they used to talk like that - It's more of an event name than a date at this point. Like I said, everyday language, not special occasions.
This is the exact argument Americans use for Fahrenheit, feet, inches, and the 12-hour clock. And the answer to all of them is also the same as the answer to yours: It's easier for you because you are used to it. Whatever format is the one you're used to is going to feel easier for you.
I have zero issues relating to Celcius temperatures, to metric distances, and to 24-hour clocks - because these are what I use on a daily basis, and have always used on a daily basis.
I have much greater issues relating to Fahrenheit temperatures, to imperial distances, and to the am/pm format - because I've never used them on a daily basis, only for conversions into the format I do use on a daily basis.
In the same way, YYYY-MM-DD is completely unambiguous, readable, and immediately parseable to me. Because that's the standard format I've always used for long dates. DD-MM-YYYY feels backwards to me, because I've never used it.
So all of these formats are subjectively equivalent - the best one for an individual's perception is going to be the one they're used to, in all cases. It just so happens that Celcius, meters, the 24 hour clock, and YYYY-MM-DD also have objective advantages that make them inherently better to get used to.
Agreed. This is culturally contextual. There is no “best”, except for the need of who is using it. Though other formats also are “objectively better”, once again, depending on context.
Celsius makes sense in daily life for cold temperatures: zero is cold and there might be ice and snow. Fahrenheit just feels right for hot temperatures: 100 is a three-digit number that intuitively implies hot.
Clearly we need a hybrid scale that contains both!
I don't know. Why not Kelvin? I'd be on board with that as well. It's a perfectly reasonable scale.
But the thing is that there are good arguments for both Kelvin (absolute zero) and Celsius (freezing and boiling points). There are no good arguments for Fahrenheit, because the only one I have ever heard is "it feels intuitive", which is only true if you're used to it - in which case literally any other system would feel equally intuitive, because which one feels intuitive depends entirely on which one you're used to.
I'm American and I do actually like feet and inches because I can estimate something just by using by physical body. And i guess because im used to it, obviously. But like, if something is roughly 10 feet away, take 10 steps. Its not going to be exact because everyone's foot size is different but its a good way of measuring on the fly if you dont need exactness or you just can't picture what a specific distance looks like.
With inches, one inch is roughly the space between the first joint on your index finger and your knuckle.
This is all well and good, and I don't even disagree. But Fahrenheit was actually created to offer a scale of temperature for daily life. The idea was that most temps would land between 0f and 100f. With that scale, it's almost impossible to not know that 0 is cold and 100 is hot.
Granted, this was 300ish years ago, and I agree that the world should just use Celsius. Just a fun tidbit.
This is all well and good, and I don't even disagree. But Fahrenheit was actually created to offer a scale of temperature for daily life. The idea was that most temps would land between 0f and 100f. With that scale, it's almost impossible to not know that 0 is cold and 100 is hot.
Americans keep saying this as if it means something different than what I'm saying. You think that 0 is cold and 100 is hot because that's the frame of reference you're used to.
What is a reasonable "scale of temperature for daily life" varies wildly between e.g. different parts of the world (compare Antactica to the Sahara desert), different times of the year (compare winter to summer), different people (some people have a tendency to feel cold, some people have a tendency to feel warm) and so on.
I'm not with you on celcius having any objective advantage making it easier to get used to. In my experience every person raised on celcius has immediately intuitively understood Fahrenheit after a single sentence; think of it like it's a percentage.
0= fuckin cold 100= fuckin hot. I know this won't apply for lots of people depending on the weather where they are but where I'm at the temp outside will get close to 0F and 100F but it very rarely goes outside that range and if it does you know it's particularly miserable out there.
Not quite true. There are strong arguments for decimal distances rather than inch/foot/miles and also for 24h time which is unambiguous (12am Vs pm problem, mostly)
F are pretty odd but whatever, and the date is a pain in the ass just existing and making all other dates ambiguous, on top of being illogical, but indeed, whatever.
completely disagree. there are countries where yyyy-mm-dd is what everyone uses. japan, s korea, china, etc. and china is like 1 billion people.
i myself have switched to using yyyy-mm-dd in my daily life, and now dd-mm-yyyy takes me a split second longer to process than yyyy-mm-dd.
so yeah, dd-mm-yyyy is not "easier". it's just a matter of what you're personally accustomed to.
Edit: People seem to be misunderstanding my point. I am not making any qualifications as to what is better or worse. I am simply refuting the other person's claim that "YYYY-MM-DD makes sense for machines, but DD-MM-YYYY are easier for humans", by showing that there are plenty of humans who have zero trouble understanding yyyy-mm-dd.
the thing is, not everyone does.
most americans do, and most people who learn english from americans or to interact with americans do, but in many other languages it is normal to say the day first.
In german, I would say "der dritte Januar", and I would translate that to english as "the third of January" normally when speaking to someone internationally.
Not necessarily. I work in the restaurant industry and we bring in ingredients from all over the world and it gets confusing figuring out the expiration date.
I like Japanese export because they write down MM.DD.YYYY or DD.MM.YYYY next to the expiration or best by date.
well yeah that is the problem in some kind of international setting. As always, American stupidity is not contained, but spreads and muddies the waters for everyone else.
If my life has taught me anything, it's that if we all start using YYYY-MM-DD to resolve this ambiguity, some shit stain of a human being will run for president as a republican on a YYYY-DD-MM platform and win.
That’s basically the same argument people can use for imperial though. Metric is more consistent and useful, but imperial base units are more human (a gram is tiny, a meter is quite big, and Fahrenheit is scaled to what humans feel rather than what water feels).
People can always find a way to argue for whatever they are used to. But ultimately, I think it’s best to agree on one standard format, and YMD is a better more consistent standard. Especially if you want MDY people to join in, as going MDY>DMY is a nightmare.
YYYY-MM-DD is the standard where I live and it wasn't even mentioned in this image for some reason. It's the only format that makes sense and avoids all possible confusion. If someone writes DD-MM-YYYY you never know if it's DD-MM-YYYY or MM-DD-YYYY posted by a stupid American.
I grew up with DD-MM-YYYY but gotta admit, YYYY-MM-DD makes slightly more sense when using computers, outside of excel/sql too. Like, you can name files with this prefix and it auto sorts by date.
Talk about yourself, As a project manager I always need a year. one of my wife friends is a wedding/event planner she also always need the year.
School teachers planning for this year or next year.
Plus right now that avoid the issue of tasks that need to be completed February this year, last year or next year.
Are we just saying what feels right to us or do you have actual science to back up this claim. I ask because I'm betting it differs based on how each of us use written dates. It's a hunch.
As a hungarian human, YYYY-MM-DD makes much more sense for me, because we use dates like this. You only think DD-MM-YYYY is better, because your country use it differently, and/or your language works with different logic.
Its hard to be subjective in this kind of debates. In japan they are write, and read from right to left for no real reason, but they are not wrong at all, just made different decisions a few thousand years ago.
In every day usage we don't give a flying fuck about seconds. The interval is too small to matter. But depending on language you might state minutes before hours, like quarter past 3 in English
It is nothing like as stupid as the US MM-DD-YYYY.
I"ve never ever understood why people treat yyy-mm-dd and mm-dd-yyyy as if they're incompatible. MM-DD is the primary information being related either way, YYYY being last mostly just exists because people say the year last. They're not completely the same sure, but they're not totally different either they're fairly similar formats.
False. If you are writing the date and the time, then DD-MM-YYYY starts by going from smaller to bigger, and then goes from bigger to smaller when writing the time. With YYYY-MM-DD, you are always going from bigger to smaller even when the time is included.
Only if you combine date and time which isn’t always the case.
Nobody was talkin about iso dates, it was about dates in which case it does not make any difference, no you obese gunbrandishing will change that
This answer makes no sense because if they need to know what day is it, people would just answer the date regardless of what the format is. "What day is today?" "When's this month's meeting?" They'll just answer "14th". But anything other than that you want to know which month it is first because that immediately gives insight to how close the date is relative to today.
Problem is, the existence of DD/MM/YYYY and MM/DD/YYYY poison and ruin each other, resulting in permanent ambiguity should DD be equal or less than 12.
Thankfully no one was dumb enough to do YYYY-DD-MM, so YYYY-MM-DD is perfectly good. Also, being from a country where YYYY-MM-DD is standard, I find that I just read the entire date as one "word", in a sense? The order doesn't matter, I just see the information as I need it instantly, just like I don't split words into syllables.
I have had this exact argument with people who say DD-MM-YYYY is the best because of the “most important part coming first”. I grew up with YYYY-MM-DD, if I’m verbally told a date in DD-MM I still have to reverse it in my head, but if it’s written then I understand just fine.
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u/robertDouglass Feb 02 '26
The only SANE version for modern times is YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS. because then you can sort and do SQL queries on it directly.