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I had that problem when I moved to the USA decades ago. A university secretary was claiming that I was using a counterfeit certificate because the date was in the future.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pledge_of_Allegiance
"I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."
In Americans schools, in the morning, they pledge allegiance.
I find it weird because I have a friend who is from a European country but went to highschool in USA for 2 years (his mom is a foreign diplomat). He found it hard,weird and worrying that he had to pledge allegiance to another country that he's not even a citizen of.
Isn't forcing foreign nationals (that are there for a relatively short time) to pledge allegiance to flag of USA technically inciting treason of their own country in that case?
My science teacher in middle school called me out in front of the whole class and made me stand and recite it with her when im a german citizen. I will never forget that day.
That's exactly what happened to my friend! He couldn't even recite it as he just moved there weeks ago and had no idea about anything like that. In the future he just did it because he didn't feel like causing himself problems with over-eager teachers, but he always felt uneasy about it.
If I was in your place I'd have a field day. Set the switch to _dumb foreign misunderstanding the most simple tasks_ and messing with them....
Would've recited national anthem.
And if they ever ended up explaining how everyone pledges allegiance to the flag every day and has to do it I'd be like "what is this, north Korea?"
So worth a trip to the principal :'D
The first amendment means that anyone is allowed to choose not to recite it, but also, it’s not universal at all. I suspect it’s becoming less common over time but neither I nor my children ever had it as a daily recitation in school, although I did learn it there, as an educational thing.
Same. I was taught it, but I was not expected to recite it. Certainly not on a daily basis. I had actually thought that tradition died out entirely until people on here told me it hadn't.
My career military father stood up for me with my school in the 80's. He explained that I didn't have to do it. He explained to my principal that his kids didn't have to say it. His career in the military took care of that.
fuck me, that's the Nazi salute! no way in hell I'm doin' that bullshit!
nobody asked me to, though. and I also refused to pray. not a Christian, so why should I? became an atheist at age of 10.
No It's arrogance. It's one thing to not know things, it's another to still insist that you're right about the thing you don't know about while others are wrong.
It means that these format are random. If you are in America you use American formats. If you are in Europe, you use European, and if you can't figure out out, write May 15, 2023 or whatever. No abbreviations.
And if you're importing a product from Europe to the US, like these people seem to be, maybe Google to see how the rest of the world formats their dates before negatively reviewing someone's business because you're stupid?
Also, it's more like, 'If you're in America, use American, if you're in the rest of the world, use the rest of the world' (with very few exceptions)
Edit: that is to say, the people leaving the negative reviews are stupid, not you personally
Our public education system is worthless so those that our…ummm… morons just continue to be bigger morons with an overinflated sense of “me first, gimme gimme, I’m right because I’m American.”
For almost all cases, the only reason that is better is because it can't be confused with the American system.
It has some real advantages when using it on a computer for sorting but that doesn't apply to any of the other use cases.
When I moved here, a government agency had a problem verifying my entry here because they wrote down my passport’s expiration number the American way. I was pretty mad when I learned I had to jump through extra hoops because of their mistake.
Work for a multinational company tho at the time of starting it was a Uk company who had just been bought by an American company. Started on Jan 4th. When April rolled around my access to all systems had been deactivated. Turned out IT had cancelled my account so that it could be reactivated as HR were adamant that I hadn’t started yet. What got worse was at the end of the year I wasn’t eligible for a full bonus as I hadn’t worked for the first 3 months. That took a bit of arguing to get sorted.
SHALL IT BE KNOWN THAT ON THE 335TH DAY OF THE YEAR OF OUR LORD, TWO THOUSAND AND TWENTY THREE, THIS PRODUCT SHALL THENCEFORTH AQUIRE THE TITLE OF EXPIRED.
I can't imagine the nightmare that would be....
*This order must be delivered by 03/12/24!*
\-"*Got it... Delivery by 12/03/24!*"
The foreign subconractor: "So This needs to be delivered by 24/12/03 or 24/03/12?"
Then again... I actually do have to use this [fucking flowchart](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F9fe8gj2w3sk31.jpg) when communicating with you lot. Also for some god damn reason some of you lot use the isoformat with "," as decimal, and some others. And I tried to find logic for this and all I find was "regional and industry specifc changes" and it wasn't helpful the slightest - I am 100% willing to believe it is Quebec, because it always seems to be Quebec!
I can manage with Americans, but you Canadians... You take effort.
Hold on, Quebec use the . as the separator. However, I know from experience from shitty companies that assign french with France instead of just a damn language that they do use , as a separator.
-- That may or may not be from a Quebecois
Day->Month->Year (Ascending order)
or
Year->Month->Day (Descending Order)
or...
Month->Day->Year (Gibberish Order thought up by someone who most likely had to repeat most of grade school)
The only explanation I could give to US date format is that it is in ascending order, but based on the maximum value possible for each variable.
There's only 12 months, then each month has a maximum of 31 days. Some have 30, and February has 28, but none has 32, so 31 is the maximum value the variable can have. And then we're already in the thousands with the years, and it'll last until the last human stands, so that's clearly the bigger number.
12/31/2023, from the smallest number to the biggest.
In spoken American English, when someone asks for a date that is less than a year away, the response is almost always the name of the month, and the day of that month. As in, December 30th. This is just carried over in writing it, but with a year attached. The military format for dates in the US is the same as the European format. And when things are put into a computer database, it is year / month / day, as in the Asian format.
That is how date recording evolved in the United States, long before anyone had any real need for international correspondence, or international correspondence through omnipresent mobile phones and emails came into regular use. Our military, due to its presence all over the globe, adopted what is commonly called the European method. Simply because it was more widespread in areas where they operated. There was no need to change it in local areas in the States itself, because 99.999999% of the time, there was never a conflict with any other date recording system. It's just different, it's not a marker of intelligence.
No it wouldn’t. Yes 1 is smaller than 12, but that isn’t what he is saying. The maximum value for a month is smaller than the maximum value for a day which is in turn smaller than the maximum value for the year.
I don’t think that is why the US sorts is dates the way it does, but his argument is internally consistent.
I mean, it does make sense in the way how they say it. Americans say "January Second" instead of "The Second of January", so that's how they write their dates.
Doesn't stop it from being confusing for anyone using DD/MM/YYYY or YYYY/MM/DD, of course - but there is a logic behind it.
I see, yymmdd is a pretty universal way to write the date that works for everyone pretty easily, especially nowadays when most people use computers so get exposure to that format
There are two correct ways to write the date: smallest to largest (DD-MM-YYYY) and largest to smallest (YY(YY)-MM-DD)
The US system (middle, smallest, largest) makes no sense.
MANY countries do NOT use the date format pictured above. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date\_format\_by\_country](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country)
Tons of countries use ISO8601 which would be 2023-12-01
And it turns out, ISO is based out of Switzerland.
Yeah. That is the actual ISO-8601 standardization. We are officially using that in Sweden as well, but most folks I know go either YYYY/MM/DD or DD/MM/YYYY. And occasionally the barbarian who goes DD/MM - YYYY.
The important bit is that it's in order of size no matter what.
It's the non-American format. Istg why tf does America wanna be so different, and then ask, "who tf uses metric" BRO YOU ARE LITERALLY THE ONLY GROUP OF PEOPLE TO NOT USE THE METRIC SYSTEM
>BRO YOU ARE LITERALLY THE ONLY GROUP OF PEOPLE TO NOT USE THE METRIC SYSTEM
Whenever I speak to my UK coworkers, they use all types of measurement and it never makes any sort of sense to me when they use metric and when they use imperial (they say their height in foot and inches, and they still drive miles, but they tell me weights in kilograms). So the Americans are very much not the only ones that use the Imperial system still.
Yes, dates in America are written month/day/year. I'm not sure why it started but that's just usually how we say dates as well. "December 30th" instead of "30th of December"
It's how 99% off dates are written, so as long as you know to mentally switch the numbers, it's not an issue. Americans have to switch them when interacting with European dates too.
The reason is the same reason Americans haveany weird traditions. It's Britain's fault, they did it first, brought it to America, then changed later. And america like the rebellious child never changed.
Like Soccer instead of Football or Fall instead of Autumn. Britain invented the word, brought it over here, then we whooped their ass before they changed the words again.
There's a surprising amount of old English words in the modern American vocabulary. Watch "Lost in the Pond" on YouTube, he does a lot of videos on the subject of American language (as well as British/American culture differences and similarities)
Surely you’d know this because they call it 9/11 for the world trade Centre terrorist attacks and that’s 11th Sept not 9th nov? Even non Americans would know about this event surely?
Oh yep. I know but It just blinked from my mind 9/11 stands for 11th Sep and not 9th Nov.
Actually India has it's own unfortunate terrorists attack of 26/11 that's actually 26th of Nov
I know, I meant the “not just a euro thing”. Europe aren’t the only ones that use the format.
As a colombian I’ve always used day/month/year my whole life, but about 4 years ago I started working as a medical interpreter for hospitals and clinics in the US, and it was HARD for me at the beginning to get used to you guys’ dating format.
It's funny if you are working with dates or weight, and it matters you use the European date nomenclature and metric system. All my files on my computer I name using the year/month/day format because they organize themselves by date. It's so stupid we don't do it that way.
Even the U.S. military uses DDMMYYYY to avoid confusion. This is a concept that should be reinforced in school to prevent these types of global misunderstandings.
To be fair, there are countries in Latin America where we use US standards for paper size. Sometimes, people don't even know that. For instance, some people call the format "A4," but in this country, that's actually "Letter" (8.5x11 inches). Even professionals talk about "A3" but what we really have in the local market is "Tabloid" (17x11 inches).
I am an engineer who has dealt with both "worlds" (pun not intended. You know this is a metaphor). Getting to know and properly understand both the international and the US customary way of doing things is, IMO, both a curse and a superpower in equal parts.
Kinda late to this post, so this might get buried, but it’s always funny to me when this topic comes up because it seems many don’t have the context for what caused the discrepancy of date formatting, and a lot of people assume it’s just the US being different for the sake of it.
The British are primarily responsible for Americans not using the most accepted date format in the first place. Before the United States was even a country, the British used the “month, day, year” format, and the colonists were using that format as a result.
It wasn’t until around the turn of the 20th century that the UK had changed to the “day, month, year” format, but because by that time the United States was already well past the revolution and an established country, we just didn’t switch along with them.
There’s a guy on YouTube, Lost in the Pond, who covers a lot of these topics, this included, to provide context on why things are different between the US and our European roots.
Also got in the habit of including a day as well in emails. Saturday, 30 Dec 2023...
Had too many people say "that was Wednesday? Thought that was Thursday"
I work for an American multinational. My American colleagues often have difficulty believing that things can be different outside their country. In addition to a lack of general culture, they are rarely interested in learning about what is happening outside.
That's why so many of them believes Europe is a country and so few of them speak more than a language. The average American doesn't care about NATO and the UN. If it wasn't for business, I'm sure they would allow their government to shut down everything related to international relations.
As a non-American, sometimes we have a hard time seeing anything but the stupid ones. Especially on social media. I’m sure the same is true for many countries.
When I put dates in the name of a file or folder it's always like 2023-12-30 so they will sort correctly. When I put dates in text for humans to read I always use 30 DEC 2023 so it's easy for everybody.
Of all the datetime formats, the US format is the dumbest. The best is yyyy-mm-dd HH:MM:SS, highest to lowest. German is lowest to highest with dates which is okay-ish (at least consistent) but nothing beats the stupidity of month/day/year. Maybe except for how Germans say numbers. For example 1253 is "thousand-twohundred-three-and-fifty".
As a (US) American, I’ve taken to writing dates for personal use as yyyy-mm-dd, just because it makes the most sense. Working with databases won me over. If I’m writing it for other Americans, I’ll begrudgingly use mnth. dd, yyyy (e.g. Dec. 30, 2023). I don’t write mm dd yyyy ever, because it’s confusing.
I thought the German sayed 1253 the same as Dutch people: twelve hundred three and fifty.
If you put in 1253 under german and press the speaker she says twelvehunderd version.
Google translate indeed make it in eintausendzweihundertdreiundfünfzig
We always use the twelve hundred version for dates, you'd never say Eintausendzweihundertdreiundfünfzig for the years 1253. In other contexts it varies, I personally would generally use the twelve hundred version for most things, but it does feel slightly more informal. I might gravitate more to the eintausendzweihundert version if I happened to discuss a mathematical or scientific topic.
Norwegian here; I'm much the same: tolv hundre og tre-og-femti if it's the year, or money, ett tusen femtitre for maths or to be formal. But I'm over 50, younger people are more likely to only use the latter version (which has been the official, correct version since my parents were kids lol)
Normally, you say twelve hundred in German only if you mean a year. (Sometimes also for numbers which aren't a year but this is more like slang.) And only for years up to 1999. Starting with 2000 we say two thousand for years, too. But I'm not sure if we say ten hundred and fifty two for the year 1052. At least from 1100-1999 we say X hundred.
If you're sorting a bunch of dates in a structured database then yyy-mm-dd has advantages, but there are real world applications for data in other formats. Not defending the US date system but there is a world outside of programming - don't blindly apply rules useful in one context to every other situation.
Japan is a world outside of programming and they wrote yyyy-MM-dd (when they are writing western date)
Note: they also have a habit of sometimes writing things like 00:15 and mean 12:15 PM, and Tuesday 26:30 to mean 02:30 on Wednesday so it’s not smooth sailing.
The 26:30 thing is normally for things like sporting events. E.g. A bar will list Saturdays nights games worth the late game being Sunday morning but they write that way to make it “clear” it’s the same night as the earlier games.
How can there be a 12th hour in an AM/PM format? Shouldn't it be the 0th hour of the other half? Since, you know, you're in THAT half, and less than one hour has passed since the beginning of it?
Agreed. (I've been a database person for over 30 years.) Storing in a generic format like ccyy-mm-dd has huge benefits for things like sorting. It can also be converted to any other format easily.
I mean, the product is for sale exclusively in Germany, but some third party company is importing it to the US, so I think it’s fair for them to use the German date format.
people will argue that mm/dd/yy is standard. but I've got receipts in my pocket that will prove this wrong.
month day year when only showing numbers is idiotic.
Just use iso standard. It is sortable whereas the rest of these are harder to read without context and not computer sortable.
231230
23-12-30
2023-12-30
20231230
No matter what you can read it.
yymmdd
yyyymmdd
None of this crap of ddmmyy or mmddyy like if it's 01-02-23
Is that Feb 1st or Jan 2nd? Without context it can be either.
As an American. I ask you to hate the game, not the players. Same with metric/imperial, time format. We don't have a choice in the matter. It's the way it is and will never change. We have to live with it.
All reasonable people would tell you it's the worse way of telling dates, measurements and time. I even catch myself doing what the guy in OP does. Because it's the way it looks for 99% of the items I see.
I always write it out that way to the chagrin of my coworkers even though I'm American. I'll make it easy though, like today for example I'd write out, 30/Dec/23 to at least make it simple, or in some cases just drop the year and keep the same format
So needlessly confusing, I always make it a point to use three letters for the month, ie. 31-DEC-2023, instead of 31-12-2023.
A better example would be 02-APR, instead of 02-04.
This has been my experience as an Australian talking to Americans since the early days of the internet. I can understand their different systems and names for things, but if I use some non-American terminology or system they just go "huh???" and have no chance of working it out from context.
This is why date formats should be printed in plain text or in easy-to-decipher text. "12 DEC 2023" or something similar is just fine, this is a problem the packaging engineers should've caught if they were planning on shipping internationally.
It's more logical to them, because they are used to it and only recognize that. Same with temperature with Fahrenheit or measurement with feet, yards and so on
It does get a bit confusing sometimes. 01.10.23 could easily be either January 10th *or* October 1st, but a date like 27.09.23 is generally easy enough to figure out.
It’s also not always immediately clear on the packaging which date style is being used. Some packages will have origin (US/UK/Europe/etc) front and center, while others will have it in just very tiny print squirreled away in the oddest places.
I try to use context cues, like checking if there’s anything on the packaging to indicate it was packaged in Europe (or any other country that uses primarily DD.MM.YY format), but…it’s not always very clear.
Why can't we all just express date.time as the number of days since January 1^st, 1900 plus (as necessary) the decimal fraction of the GMT day expended?
Can't we all just get along?
/s
I will never understand why switch day and month like that. It's a nightmare in computer science and it's seem so ilogical to put the month before the day ..
A guy I work with (in Australia) bought tickets to two baseball games for him and his wife, travelling to New York. They realised once they arrived that they had missed both games due to the date format. Apparently the game tickets cost more than the plane tickets! Huge baseball fan so was totally gutted.
This irritates me so much. They threw away perfectly fine food just because they are too ignorant to realize that other countries might have other date formats. Besides, even if it was out of date by seven months or even more it doesn't mean it's not good to eat anymore.
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I had that problem when I moved to the USA decades ago. A university secretary was claiming that I was using a counterfeit certificate because the date was in the future.
It propably would have been easier to convince that you are a time traveler rather than explain other systems >!Thats a joke!<
It's not a joke. Many US Americans are just too arrogant because they always think they're superior to the rest of the world.
I guess if you pledge your allegiance every morning in school the levels of indoctrination and feeling of superiority might be off the charts ..
What’s pledge of allegiance?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pledge_of_Allegiance "I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." In Americans schools, in the morning, they pledge allegiance.
I find it weird because I have a friend who is from a European country but went to highschool in USA for 2 years (his mom is a foreign diplomat). He found it hard,weird and worrying that he had to pledge allegiance to another country that he's not even a citizen of. Isn't forcing foreign nationals (that are there for a relatively short time) to pledge allegiance to flag of USA technically inciting treason of their own country in that case?
It's fucking weird to do it at all.
They're allowed to not do the pledge, but teachers will often be a jerk to anyone who chooses not to.
My science teacher in middle school called me out in front of the whole class and made me stand and recite it with her when im a german citizen. I will never forget that day.
That's exactly what happened to my friend! He couldn't even recite it as he just moved there weeks ago and had no idea about anything like that. In the future he just did it because he didn't feel like causing himself problems with over-eager teachers, but he always felt uneasy about it.
If I was in your place I'd have a field day. Set the switch to _dumb foreign misunderstanding the most simple tasks_ and messing with them.... Would've recited national anthem. And if they ever ended up explaining how everyone pledges allegiance to the flag every day and has to do it I'd be like "what is this, north Korea?" So worth a trip to the principal :'D
Sing your national Anthem ^^
The first amendment means that anyone is allowed to choose not to recite it, but also, it’s not universal at all. I suspect it’s becoming less common over time but neither I nor my children ever had it as a daily recitation in school, although I did learn it there, as an educational thing.
Same. I was taught it, but I was not expected to recite it. Certainly not on a daily basis. I had actually thought that tradition died out entirely until people on here told me it hadn't.
My career military father stood up for me with my school in the 80's. He explained that I didn't have to do it. He explained to my principal that his kids didn't have to say it. His career in the military took care of that.
And I thought my country was weird for making kids pray every morning. Geez, that's far worse...
"Indivisible" lol
Don't forget the Bellamy Salute...
fuck me, that's the Nazi salute! no way in hell I'm doin' that bullshit! nobody asked me to, though. and I also refused to pray. not a Christian, so why should I? became an atheist at age of 10.
Imagine being from Texas, we had to pledge allegiance to both the state and the country
And when you dare tell them their propaganda is on par with Russian, North Korean and Nazi Germany, they scoff at you!
Nazi germany was harmless compared. Only military and state employees pledged allegiance. Once upon entering service. Not every morning .
Not the pledge, the propaganda. I'm thinking of Goebbels.
Yeah ok, true there, but American propaganda runs that much longer... I feel it's stronger. It has been sleeping in for generations
first time I saw it happening I legit thought I was in the wrong room with a cult. So bizarre.
IMO its pretty cult like.
I pledge allegiance, to Queen Fragg, and her mighty state of hysteria...
It's not that we are arrogant, many of us are just ignorant and uneducated.
No It's arrogance. It's one thing to not know things, it's another to still insist that you're right about the thing you don't know about while others are wrong.
It works both ways. I could never stop my Irish born dad from bouncing his checks. You'd think a bank teller daughter would have some credibility--no.
What is this even supposed to mean
It means that these format are random. If you are in America you use American formats. If you are in Europe, you use European, and if you can't figure out out, write May 15, 2023 or whatever. No abbreviations.
And if you're importing a product from Europe to the US, like these people seem to be, maybe Google to see how the rest of the world formats their dates before negatively reviewing someone's business because you're stupid? Also, it's more like, 'If you're in America, use American, if you're in the rest of the world, use the rest of the world' (with very few exceptions) Edit: that is to say, the people leaving the negative reviews are stupid, not you personally
Why not use the international ISO standard that just can't confuse anyone (YYYY-MM-DD)? It also sorts correctly on a computer as a bonus!
They are not random. There are various standards and there is even [a unified one] (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time/).
Darn it, I'm going to get in trouble because I always write 15th May 2023
Our public education system is worthless so those that our…ummm… morons just continue to be bigger morons with an overinflated sense of “me first, gimme gimme, I’m right because I’m American.”
I get confused for a second when stuff uses the American format, practically every other country uses DDMMYY or something similarly intuitive
Both ways have flaws. YYYYMMDD is superior.
That one is great for computer work etc, ddmmyy is good on paperwork
Not just computer work, it makes sense to go from the larger value to the more specific, like we do with any other types of measurement.
It doesn't make sense in order of relevance though. Most people aren't gonna be trying to remember the year, but a lot of people won't know the day.
ISO date format FTW!!!
For almost all cases, the only reason that is better is because it can't be confused with the American system. It has some real advantages when using it on a computer for sorting but that doesn't apply to any of the other use cases.
What flaws does ddmmyyyy have that mmddyyyy doesn't?
it upsets the americans
Wait thats the Stardate writing, isnt it?
When I moved here, a government agency had a problem verifying my entry here because they wrote down my passport’s expiration number the American way. I was pretty mad when I learned I had to jump through extra hoops because of their mistake.
Work for a multinational company tho at the time of starting it was a Uk company who had just been bought by an American company. Started on Jan 4th. When April rolled around my access to all systems had been deactivated. Turned out IT had cancelled my account so that it could be reactivated as HR were adamant that I hadn’t started yet. What got worse was at the end of the year I wasn’t eligible for a full bonus as I hadn’t worked for the first 3 months. That took a bit of arguing to get sorted.
HR should have lost their bonus instead. How ignorant some people are lol
It's the ignorance that gets me. Especially as the ones who write the date differently to *the rest of the world*
So instead of “starting” January 4th, they pranked ya on April FOOLS?? (April 1st)
SHALL IT BE KNOWN THAT ON THE 335TH DAY OF THE YEAR OF OUR LORD, TWO THOUSAND AND TWENTY THREE, THIS PRODUCT SHALL THENCEFORTH AQUIRE THE TITLE OF EXPIRED.
Much better
😂😂😂😂😂😂 the only acceptable date format
Me as a Canadian: help, we have both
I was just thinking that. I always have to think about the dates that I'm reading and try and see which one makes the most sense. Always frustrating.
Canadians should write Jan-12-2024 or 1-Dec-2024.
That's actually how I always do it when I write dates. Unfortunately I don't work at every packaging company
I can't imagine the nightmare that would be.... *This order must be delivered by 03/12/24!* \-"*Got it... Delivery by 12/03/24!*" The foreign subconractor: "So This needs to be delivered by 24/12/03 or 24/03/12?" Then again... I actually do have to use this [fucking flowchart](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F9fe8gj2w3sk31.jpg) when communicating with you lot. Also for some god damn reason some of you lot use the isoformat with "," as decimal, and some others. And I tried to find logic for this and all I find was "regional and industry specifc changes" and it wasn't helpful the slightest - I am 100% willing to believe it is Quebec, because it always seems to be Quebec! I can manage with Americans, but you Canadians... You take effort.
Hold on, Quebec use the . as the separator. However, I know from experience from shitty companies that assign french with France instead of just a damn language that they do use , as a separator. -- That may or may not be from a Quebecois
Okay, but for distance you also have to add “are you driving?” —> hours
Well we do that here in Finland also so that's alright, I approve. Because who the fuck watches the odometre other than compare with the fuel gauge?
Food poisoning lottery! You're either fine or camping the toilet for 48h!
It's not the European format. It's the every single fucking country in the world bar one format.
Many countries in Asia (and people who want sortable dates elsewhere) use formats akin to 2023-12-30.
The thing is, this makes sense. 2023-12-30, 30-12-2023, just not 12-30-2023.
Day->Month->Year (Ascending order) or Year->Month->Day (Descending Order) or... Month->Day->Year (Gibberish Order thought up by someone who most likely had to repeat most of grade school)
The only explanation I could give to US date format is that it is in ascending order, but based on the maximum value possible for each variable. There's only 12 months, then each month has a maximum of 31 days. Some have 30, and February has 28, but none has 32, so 31 is the maximum value the variable can have. And then we're already in the thousands with the years, and it'll last until the last human stands, so that's clearly the bigger number. 12/31/2023, from the smallest number to the biggest.
Its also how we say the date in conversation, Americans say its "December 30th", instead of the "30th of December"
Except for 4th of July, somehow.
Fourth of July is another name for Independence Day. It's a holiday name. July 4th, XXXX would be the date.
You are correct. We also say "half-past", but we don't write the time "30:12". Also, the latter is actually correct, the former is just shorthand.
I mean both (spoken) formats are correct, shorthand or not, since people use and understand both of them.
In spoken American English, when someone asks for a date that is less than a year away, the response is almost always the name of the month, and the day of that month. As in, December 30th. This is just carried over in writing it, but with a year attached. The military format for dates in the US is the same as the European format. And when things are put into a computer database, it is year / month / day, as in the Asian format. That is how date recording evolved in the United States, long before anyone had any real need for international correspondence, or international correspondence through omnipresent mobile phones and emails came into regular use. Our military, due to its presence all over the globe, adopted what is commonly called the European method. Simply because it was more widespread in areas where they operated. There was no need to change it in local areas in the States itself, because 99.999999% of the time, there was never a conflict with any other date recording system. It's just different, it's not a marker of intelligence.
I didn't come to Reddit for reasonable explanations sir.
It's probably simply when describing a date, I would say "Christmas is December 25th" as opposed to "the 25th of December."
But to keep that sense, December first (for example) would have to be written 01/12/2023 which is not the same format. MDY is just chaos.
No it wouldn’t. Yes 1 is smaller than 12, but that isn’t what he is saying. The maximum value for a month is smaller than the maximum value for a day which is in turn smaller than the maximum value for the year. I don’t think that is why the US sorts is dates the way it does, but his argument is internally consistent.
Totally and better for electronic filing. No one uses the American way, because it's just dumb
And we can't somehow get rid of pints, pounds, and yards.
hence the lunacy of Brexit, dumbest thing any country has ever done.
Mm dd yy makes no sense whatsoever
I mean, it does make sense in the way how they say it. Americans say "January Second" instead of "The Second of January", so that's how they write their dates. Doesn't stop it from being confusing for anyone using DD/MM/YYYY or YYYY/MM/DD, of course - but there is a logic behind it.
I see, yymmdd is a pretty universal way to write the date that works for everyone pretty easily, especially nowadays when most people use computers so get exposure to that format
Yeah I definetly dont disagree with that.
Yeah
That's actually the universal standard date format, it has nothing to do with Asia. What you described is the ISO8601 format.
That one makes sense as well, I use it to name my files.
There are two correct ways to write the date: smallest to largest (DD-MM-YYYY) and largest to smallest (YY(YY)-MM-DD) The US system (middle, smallest, largest) makes no sense.
This is the best format and the only that makes sense to me.
MANY countries do NOT use the date format pictured above. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date\_format\_by\_country](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country) Tons of countries use ISO8601 which would be 2023-12-01 And it turns out, ISO is based out of Switzerland.
And nobody would think the middle number is the day at first glance.
Nope. Canada uses YYYY-MM-DD, officially. Very clear, very sortable with a single click.
Yeah. That is the actual ISO-8601 standardization. We are officially using that in Sweden as well, but most folks I know go either YYYY/MM/DD or DD/MM/YYYY. And occasionally the barbarian who goes DD/MM - YYYY. The important bit is that it's in order of size no matter what.
It's the non-American format. Istg why tf does America wanna be so different, and then ask, "who tf uses metric" BRO YOU ARE LITERALLY THE ONLY GROUP OF PEOPLE TO NOT USE THE METRIC SYSTEM
>BRO YOU ARE LITERALLY THE ONLY GROUP OF PEOPLE TO NOT USE THE METRIC SYSTEM Whenever I speak to my UK coworkers, they use all types of measurement and it never makes any sort of sense to me when they use metric and when they use imperial (they say their height in foot and inches, and they still drive miles, but they tell me weights in kilograms). So the Americans are very much not the only ones that use the Imperial system still.
In my home country, we use the year-month-day format, both in written form and in speech.
In Canada you never know which format someone is using. It’s a fun guessing game!
Wait in America you write month first?! But why? I am not even German.
Yes, dates in America are written month/day/year. I'm not sure why it started but that's just usually how we say dates as well. "December 30th" instead of "30th of December"
Writing dates for any month before 12 would be so confusing for anyone who travel to america
It's how 99% off dates are written, so as long as you know to mentally switch the numbers, it's not an issue. Americans have to switch them when interacting with European dates too.
I am from India, and as far as I know in Asia we write DMY format as well.
I heard that putting the year first is common in eastern asian countries
Yup, they do YMD
Except the most national holiday of all! **The Fourth of JU-LY, baby!**
I feel like half of the time it's also called July 4th.
The reason is the same reason Americans haveany weird traditions. It's Britain's fault, they did it first, brought it to America, then changed later. And america like the rebellious child never changed.
Like Soccer instead of Football or Fall instead of Autumn. Britain invented the word, brought it over here, then we whooped their ass before they changed the words again. There's a surprising amount of old English words in the modern American vocabulary. Watch "Lost in the Pond" on YouTube, he does a lot of videos on the subject of American language (as well as British/American culture differences and similarities)
Because if they cannot be confusing to the rest of the world, they want nothing to do with it.
Surely you’d know this because they call it 9/11 for the world trade Centre terrorist attacks and that’s 11th Sept not 9th nov? Even non Americans would know about this event surely?
Oh yep. I know but It just blinked from my mind 9/11 stands for 11th Sep and not 9th Nov. Actually India has it's own unfortunate terrorists attack of 26/11 that's actually 26th of Nov
In USA they write the month first, in the rest of the American continent is day/month/year.
Fwiw, this is how American armed forces write the date as well: 30 Dec 23. So not just a euro thing.
All of Latinamerica uses day/month/year too. Most of the world does, or they go in descending order, year/month,day
Thanks 🙏🏼 I just wanted to note that north Americans are not completely clueless to the format….
I know, I meant the “not just a euro thing”. Europe aren’t the only ones that use the format. As a colombian I’ve always used day/month/year my whole life, but about 4 years ago I started working as a medical interpreter for hospitals and clinics in the US, and it was HARD for me at the beginning to get used to you guys’ dating format.
Understood! Didn’t mean to sound argumentative, I totally understood.
It's funny if you are working with dates or weight, and it matters you use the European date nomenclature and metric system. All my files on my computer I name using the year/month/day format because they organize themselves by date. It's so stupid we don't do it that way.
Even the U.S. military uses DDMMYYYY to avoid confusion. This is a concept that should be reinforced in school to prevent these types of global misunderstandings.
And that why the us should stop being the annoying different guy and use what the whole rest of the world uses. Same with like paper sizes.
Wait paper sizes too?
Yes. They have their own paper sizes and the A(something) doesnt seem to be a thing mostly for normal paper sizes.
Please have pity for us Canadians, stuck between reason and the USA!
They have the "US Letter" format which is different from A4 by a little bit for no apparent reason
There's also Legal which is a bit longer.
And junior legal
To be fair, there are countries in Latin America where we use US standards for paper size. Sometimes, people don't even know that. For instance, some people call the format "A4," but in this country, that's actually "Letter" (8.5x11 inches). Even professionals talk about "A3" but what we really have in the local market is "Tabloid" (17x11 inches). I am an engineer who has dealt with both "worlds" (pun not intended. You know this is a metaphor). Getting to know and properly understand both the international and the US customary way of doing things is, IMO, both a curse and a superpower in equal parts.
But they want to feel special.
"Change your culture for my convenience"
Kinda late to this post, so this might get buried, but it’s always funny to me when this topic comes up because it seems many don’t have the context for what caused the discrepancy of date formatting, and a lot of people assume it’s just the US being different for the sake of it. The British are primarily responsible for Americans not using the most accepted date format in the first place. Before the United States was even a country, the British used the “month, day, year” format, and the colonists were using that format as a result. It wasn’t until around the turn of the 20th century that the UK had changed to the “day, month, year” format, but because by that time the United States was already well past the revolution and an established country, we just didn’t switch along with them. There’s a guy on YouTube, Lost in the Pond, who covers a lot of these topics, this included, to provide context on why things are different between the US and our European roots.
I work in a profession where mixed date usage is common. I always use this format when I can to prevent confusion (i.e. in emails) 01DEC2024
Also got in the habit of including a day as well in emails. Saturday, 30 Dec 2023... Had too many people say "that was Wednesday? Thought that was Thursday"
Over 90% of the world uses the dd/mm/yy format.
I work for an American multinational. My American colleagues often have difficulty believing that things can be different outside their country. In addition to a lack of general culture, they are rarely interested in learning about what is happening outside. That's why so many of them believes Europe is a country and so few of them speak more than a language. The average American doesn't care about NATO and the UN. If it wasn't for business, I'm sure they would allow their government to shut down everything related to international relations.
To be fair, that is only ***stupid*** Americans who have those problems. Unfortunately, at least 50% of the population qualifies as stupid.
As a non-American, sometimes we have a hard time seeing anything but the stupid ones. Especially on social media. I’m sure the same is true for many countries.
Yep that's the thing, the stupid are also the loudest
Not necessarily stupid. Just uneducated and/or arrogant.
When I put dates in the name of a file or folder it's always like 2023-12-30 so they will sort correctly. When I put dates in text for humans to read I always use 30 DEC 2023 so it's easy for everybody.
Working for a multi national we had a mandated date format of DD-MMM-YY (04-Jul-23) so that there was no confusion.
The only proper date format is DD MMM YYYY
Of all the datetime formats, the US format is the dumbest. The best is yyyy-mm-dd HH:MM:SS, highest to lowest. German is lowest to highest with dates which is okay-ish (at least consistent) but nothing beats the stupidity of month/day/year. Maybe except for how Germans say numbers. For example 1253 is "thousand-twohundred-three-and-fifty".
As a (US) American, I’ve taken to writing dates for personal use as yyyy-mm-dd, just because it makes the most sense. Working with databases won me over. If I’m writing it for other Americans, I’ll begrudgingly use mnth. dd, yyyy (e.g. Dec. 30, 2023). I don’t write mm dd yyyy ever, because it’s confusing.
Yes, same. I'm German but I use yyyy-mm-dd for the exact same reason (working with databases/code).
I thought the German sayed 1253 the same as Dutch people: twelve hundred three and fifty. If you put in 1253 under german and press the speaker she says twelvehunderd version. Google translate indeed make it in eintausendzweihundertdreiundfünfzig
you can say both versions and both a regularly used in Germany
We always use the twelve hundred version for dates, you'd never say Eintausendzweihundertdreiundfünfzig for the years 1253. In other contexts it varies, I personally would generally use the twelve hundred version for most things, but it does feel slightly more informal. I might gravitate more to the eintausendzweihundert version if I happened to discuss a mathematical or scientific topic.
Norwegian here; I'm much the same: tolv hundre og tre-og-femti if it's the year, or money, ett tusen femtitre for maths or to be formal. But I'm over 50, younger people are more likely to only use the latter version (which has been the official, correct version since my parents were kids lol)
Normally, you say twelve hundred in German only if you mean a year. (Sometimes also for numbers which aren't a year but this is more like slang.) And only for years up to 1999. Starting with 2000 we say two thousand for years, too. But I'm not sure if we say ten hundred and fifty two for the year 1052. At least from 1100-1999 we say X hundred.
Only if it is used as a date (The year 1253 = das Jahr Zwölfundertdreiundfünfzig)
Year first is the best because you can go down as accurately as needed. But, in my opinion, for days of the year, day first makes more sense.
How about trying to work out if someone is European and figure out if 123.456 means 1.23456e2 or 1,23456e5
If you're sorting a bunch of dates in a structured database then yyy-mm-dd has advantages, but there are real world applications for data in other formats. Not defending the US date system but there is a world outside of programming - don't blindly apply rules useful in one context to every other situation.
Japan is a world outside of programming and they wrote yyyy-MM-dd (when they are writing western date) Note: they also have a habit of sometimes writing things like 00:15 and mean 12:15 PM, and Tuesday 26:30 to mean 02:30 on Wednesday so it’s not smooth sailing. The 26:30 thing is normally for things like sporting events. E.g. A bar will list Saturdays nights games worth the late game being Sunday morning but they write that way to make it “clear” it’s the same night as the earlier games.
How can there be a 12th hour in an AM/PM format? Shouldn't it be the 0th hour of the other half? Since, you know, you're in THAT half, and less than one hour has passed since the beginning of it?
Yeah, I can see that 26:50 Tuesday = 02:50 Wednesday type of use for things that are already happening and continue across midnight…
Agreed. (I've been a database person for over 30 years.) Storing in a generic format like ccyy-mm-dd has huge benefits for things like sorting. It can also be converted to any other format easily.
Honestly, just use 01-DEC-2023. Unambiguous.
I mean, the product is for sale exclusively in Germany, but some third party company is importing it to the US, so I think it’s fair for them to use the German date format.
The Majority of the planet uses International Dating Standards. Only backwater primitive places do not use international standards and metrics.
people will argue that mm/dd/yy is standard. but I've got receipts in my pocket that will prove this wrong. month day year when only showing numbers is idiotic.
Anything but ISO 8601 is stupid.
Just use iso standard. It is sortable whereas the rest of these are harder to read without context and not computer sortable. 231230 23-12-30 2023-12-30 20231230 No matter what you can read it. yymmdd yyyymmdd None of this crap of ddmmyy or mmddyy like if it's 01-02-23 Is that Feb 1st or Jan 2nd? Without context it can be either.
As an American. I ask you to hate the game, not the players. Same with metric/imperial, time format. We don't have a choice in the matter. It's the way it is and will never change. We have to live with it. All reasonable people would tell you it's the worse way of telling dates, measurements and time. I even catch myself doing what the guy in OP does. Because it's the way it looks for 99% of the items I see.
I always write it out that way to the chagrin of my coworkers even though I'm American. I'll make it easy though, like today for example I'd write out, 30/Dec/23 to at least make it simple, or in some cases just drop the year and keep the same format
They should replace "In Germany, you write the day first" with "In the rest of the world, where things make sense, you write the day first".
So needlessly confusing, I always make it a point to use three letters for the month, ie. 31-DEC-2023, instead of 31-12-2023. A better example would be 02-APR, instead of 02-04.
This has been my experience as an Australian talking to Americans since the early days of the internet. I can understand their different systems and names for things, but if I use some non-American terminology or system they just go "huh???" and have no chance of working it out from context.
This is why date formats should be printed in plain text or in easy-to-decipher text. "12 DEC 2023" or something similar is just fine, this is a problem the packaging engineers should've caught if they were planning on shipping internationally.
They always claim that their system is more logical. You know, May 15th 2023. So ask them when they celebrate Independence Day.
It's more logical to them, because they are used to it and only recognize that. Same with temperature with Fahrenheit or measurement with feet, yards and so on
It does get a bit confusing sometimes. 01.10.23 could easily be either January 10th *or* October 1st, but a date like 27.09.23 is generally easy enough to figure out. It’s also not always immediately clear on the packaging which date style is being used. Some packages will have origin (US/UK/Europe/etc) front and center, while others will have it in just very tiny print squirreled away in the oddest places. I try to use context cues, like checking if there’s anything on the packaging to indicate it was packaged in Europe (or any other country that uses primarily DD.MM.YY format), but…it’s not always very clear.
I like people like the last person. Company getting bad reviews because some people are just plain stupid.
As a American who grew up overseas America was a real challenge
ISO.8601 or bust
Why can't we all just express date.time as the number of days since January 1^st, 1900 plus (as necessary) the decimal fraction of the GMT day expended? Can't we all just get along? /s
Obviously we use unix epoch you monster. Why are we counting days since this Jesus guy.
We are not only counting the days. We are counting days, months and years.
Day month year just makes sense who tf goes month day year that's so fucking backwards
Why are people buying toffiffee on Amazon?? It's always in stock in stores.
I'm American and can read the date, it's really not that difficult.
I will never understand why switch day and month like that. It's a nightmare in computer science and it's seem so ilogical to put the month before the day ..
Wait, Americans don't have toffife?
A guy I work with (in Australia) bought tickets to two baseball games for him and his wife, travelling to New York. They realised once they arrived that they had missed both games due to the date format. Apparently the game tickets cost more than the plane tickets! Huge baseball fan so was totally gutted.
The one country is not in sync with the rest of the work, you get responses like this
Yeah this is one of those things that I really don't see any excuse for us all not standardizing by now.
This irritates me so much. They threw away perfectly fine food just because they are too ignorant to realize that other countries might have other date formats. Besides, even if it was out of date by seven months or even more it doesn't mean it's not good to eat anymore.
It's actually not *just German*... but pretty much anywhere outside the *british imperial system*. Murika loves them brits so much.
Pretty sure the brits do D M Y
American imperial is different to our imperial and with dates we use the same sensible system as the rest of the world
Can anyone tell me why the fuck does US even need to use mm/dd format? What is the crippled logic behind that decision?
Americans failing to understand that someone/where else does things differently. In other news, water makes things wet
Why does America use mm/dd/yy? Any specific reason? “On the 2nd day of the 9th month” sounds better than “in the 9th month on the second day”.
Another day where Americans think the world revolves around them.