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Please Don’t Abbreviate the Year ‘2020’ on Checks and Legal Documents

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Re: Please Don’t Abbreviate the Year ‘2020’ on Checks and Legal Documents

#13
post #9
post #4

I saw one of my aunts share this on Facebook and was unsure if it was actual advice or just the normal chain mail spam that gets passed around. Thoughts?

This one does make sense. I haven't read it yet, but I always write the full year. For 2020, if you abbreviate it as just 20, adding two more digits allows anyone to fake a future date into 79 years (2021, 2022.. 2099) etc However in the past, this would have been avoided since abbreviating 2019 as 19 and adding two digits would move you into the past which wont make sense always.

Moving a date into the past or the future can both be just as disruptive, depending on the application.

Re: Please Don’t Abbreviate the Year ‘2020’ on Checks and Legal Documents

#14

(1) stop using checks already and (2) legal documents should always have the full date (spelled out) on them anyway, so if you just use '20' then that would have been wrong anyway, but 11/Dec/20.

Occasionally some places leave you no option but to use a check, at least in the US.

Re: Please Don’t Abbreviate the Year ‘2020’ on Checks and Legal Documents

#15

Yet more reason to use the objectively correct date format. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Dates

How is it more "objectively correct" than DD-MM-YYYY?

ASCII sorting order is chronological order.

Re: Please Don’t Abbreviate the Year ‘2020’ on Checks and Legal Documents

#16

Yet more reason to use the objectively correct date format. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Dates

How is it more "objectively correct" than DD-MM-YYYY?

Because its unambiguous -- DD-MM-YYYY could be confused for MM-DD-YYYY

Re: Please Don’t Abbreviate the Year ‘2020’ on Checks and Legal Documents

#17

Yet more reason to use the objectively correct date format. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Dates

That is the right format but 'normal people' assume context first so the 12th of January without further context indicates the present year and the 12th of January 2019 or just '19 is enough to disambiguate. The ISO date code was created with computers in mind (sort order) but real people are not computers and besides that there are quite a few other date systems in the world so it is biased to Gregorian anyway.

Re: Please Don’t Abbreviate the Year ‘2020’ on Checks and Legal Documents

#18

(1) stop using checks already and (2) legal documents should always have the full date (spelled out) on them anyway, so if you just use '20' then that would have been wrong anyway, but 11/Dec/20.

The year is completely ambiguous, could easily be changed from 20 to 2019, 2018, 20anything! ️

Re: Please Don’t Abbreviate the Year ‘2020’ on Checks and Legal Documents

#19

(1) stop using checks already and (2) legal documents should always have the full date (spelled out) on them anyway, so if you just use '20' then that would have been wrong anyway, but 11/Dec/20.

Seems like a joke, to think that people still use cheques somewhere... like what the fuck
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