You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)

The premise is that this would be pasted in its entirety into a reply to a usenet or listserv post, with the text of the appropriate line- or lines- modified from "( )" to "(x)".

The implication is that amateur calendarists, who do not fully grasp the enormity of the task, frequently post to this list with proposals for a new calendar. The regular contributors to this list see so many ill-conceived proposals that they have prepared a post with all of the common mistakes and oversights so they may shoot the theory down without having to type them all over again.

In reality this list is prepared and posted as a joke for the members of the community and a deterrent to posting calendar proposals at all, at least those that do not consider all of these common errors ahead of time.

My favorite calendar disaster was the Swedish calendar[1] between 1700 and 1753.

They had a somewhat (?) reasonable plan:

In November 1699, the Government of Sweden decided that, rather than adopt the Gregorian calendar outright, it would gradually approach it over a 40-year period. The plan was to skip all leap days in the period 1700 to 1740. Every fourth year, the gap between the Swedish calendar and the Gregorian would reduce by one day, until they finally lined up in 1740. In the meantime, this calendar would not be in line with either of the major alternative calendars and the differences would change every four years.

Then war started and they stopped, after starting the process, so they were on their own calendar that no one else in the world used.

Then the king decided it was a bad idea, so reverted to the Julian calendar. Then they decided to jump to the Gregorian outright.

There's a bunch of other details, like Easter being calculated by one calendar but Easter Sunday by the other.

Oh yeah, and they had February 30 one year[2] (which was Feb 29 in a Julian calendar or March 11 Gregorian).

And in 1753 they finally sorted it all out by skipping all the days between February 17 and March 1.

Good luck writing billing software for that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_calendar

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_non-standard_dates#Swe...

I remember seeing that posted often, back when email spam was a big problem, and it always bothered me. Whenever people were discussing possible fixes, someone would post that checklist -- and you could always find some way to apply the checklist, even if it was just by invoking the generic "Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches" objection. Every sophisticated person knew that the email spam problem was intractable. Your inbox would always be full of spam, and it was considered foolish to think otherwise.

I haven't had much spam hit my inbox lately, though. So much for the checklist.

The disadvantages listed are pretty are pretty much nothing.

alt.chrome.the.moon forever!