There is basically no cost to doing the change, and it would allow for a metric that makes sense for every single human instead of about 30% of them.
We can have an improved metric that does its job factually better (that job being to set a historical reference point in continuity with the whole of contemporary humanity), for no significant cost. I don't see reasons why not, except maybe out of tradition, except that it's only a tradition for less than 1/3rd of humanity at most.
As a reason for objection, even lazyness wouldn't make sense. It takes about as much effort to object to it as it would to adopt it, if not more.
What you perceive as laziness the rest of us perceive as a resolution to a non-issue. Slapping an additional 1 to the beginning of the year we already does nothing. As you said earlier, flipped, you can just pretend it's there and all will be happy.
Well, it is an issue in that the gregorian calendar has unnecessary social and political implications in the context of world-wide use, due to being present de facto in pretty much everything that everyone uses everywhere, even in cases where a culturally-appropriate or culturally-neutral calendar could have already been used interchangeably instead.
It's understandable that it may not be seen as an issue in cultural communities of predominantly christian background, but those communities gain just as much from adopting a calendar with a historical reference point that everyone already has in common, including them.
But even if it wasn't an issue anywhere, as I said, the new calendar still serves its purpose better in all cases anyway.
Really nobody loses anything here, and everyone gains a more appropriate historical reference point.
I might have missed something, but I don't see any real cost to using the new calendar worldwide, even less so one that would outweigh the benefit, as small as you might think that benefit is.
This is a really good reason not to change it, I still don't understand what benefit there would be to changing it.
Just communicating to people that the date standard is changing would have a massive cost, actually changing anything would be orders of magnitude higher than that.
So who is going to pay to reprogram every date and time system and device that uses said system on the planet?
Also seems pretty arbitrary. Like if it marks the beginning of Aleppo, Babylon, Ur or one of the other original cities I would understand. But it is just the Gregorian calendar with 10000 years added to it.
Date and time is one of the largest pain in the ass things to program. Most companies once they have it working will not allow anyone to touch it.
So this basically comes down to "I'm (we're) not Christian so lets change the entire worlds arbitrary time keeping mechanism that's been nearly universally adopted by choice."
That's precisely so nobody would have to reprogram anything that's already in use. New stuff can easily be made retrocompatible (because it's just +10000) and the old stuff can always keep the old numerical standard because it's not drastically different and still contextually intelligible under the new system. The interpretation in the user's head is most of what has to be actively implemented, and that's neither a hardware or software thing.
So basically no point then. Unless it makes a true different start date there is no reason to change. The Jewish calendar make more sense since it marks an event under that logic.
BTW, the anthropocene adaptation of the gregorian system is pretty much the easiest to implement as far as worthwhile calendar reforms go. It's the most bang for the least buck.
But adopting an entirely new calendar system could provide a much better bang-per-buck ratio, at the cost of actually having to modify or replace existing stuff.
Yeah, it would also be a good reference point, but it would not fit as conveniently as the start of the Anthropocene. We'd still have to change the existing calendars, while the Anthropocene calendar just has us adding 10000 years. The point of the anthropocene calendar is that the change is effortless.
It's partly because the French Revolution didn't exactly work either. The Republic is on its 5th attempt at stability. Also, the revolutionary calendar was a bit bonkers.
The metric system was a big thing in the French Revolution that did end up working, however.
After lurking through this whole thread my final stance is:
Who gives a shit?
Aside from some bizarre SJW shenanigans, nobody cares about why it's 2017 right now. Don't like that it's "Christian"? Switch to using BCE and CE, it's the exact same thing and it's readily accepted.
Why would the date be changed on those specific systems if we know in advance that those in particular would be bricked as a result? Transition is a thing. This is about changing a historical reference point in culturally meaningful contexts, the stuff that isn't socially memetic obviously does not need to be changed immediately. Also, here, transitionning mostly means figuring out a way to add 10000 to a given number when it is contextually appropriate. Exceptions aren't problematic, it's totally possible to wait for such sytems and/or machines to be replaced when appropriate anyway.
The point of the anthropocene calendar is that you don't have to brick stuff by changing the date, it's still intelligible by people that "2016" in such contexts does not mean that X account had been doing Y before the bronze age even came around... Meanwhile, new stuff can just as well show the correct date without humans being confused, while programming can take into account the old system for those exceptional cases.
We could also change everything to adopt an entirely new calendar system with a pattern of two 30-day months, followed by one 31-day month, that is actually scientifically accurate and reliable on the long-term. It would be a lot more simple and efficient than the gregorian calendarfor business and scientific purposes, which is basically the only two reasons why everyone still used the gregorian calendar after the 20th century.
Except you would have to introduce a new practice to every place that deals with times and dates.
Whenever someone claims any project is effortless, calculate double the time and triple the cost to implement it. Oh, and the trouble you get yourself into afterwards is a massive pain!
I think we should change the entire system anyways. We have to change everything by 2038 anyways due to the Y2038 bug. Programming datetime is consistently the worst and most buggy feature developers have to deal with. I've heard somewhere that programming experience is directly correlated with how much you complain about datetime.
Come to think of it, there is an actual problem with transition from 2017 to 12017: for BCE, you can't just subtract year from 10000 because there is no year 0 to correspond to year 10000, it's 1 BCE then immediately 1 CE. You will have a 1 year shift for all BCE dates.