🇨🇦🇩🇪🇨🇳张殿李🇨🇳🇩🇪🇨🇦

with the earliest recorded year being rooted in archaeology

Wait, THAT’s your source of “4241BC is the beginning of history”!?!?!?!? A 19th-early-20th century preacher!?

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

He didn’t use any kind of evidence-based system to establish that date. He did, for all practical purposes, numerology! That claim is as valid as the various pre-Xia mythical dynasties of China or the claim of the Australian Aborigines that they were “always” in Australia and didn’t come from anywhere else!

Hoo boy, somebody needs to do a little bit more reading before redesigning time!

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Can you point, please, to a (preferably Chinese) source that supports your claim of eight-day weeks? I have precisely zero sources for eight day weeks, but have quite a few for 6, 7, 9, 10, and 12.

But lunar cycles are 29.5 days, not 28.

We don’t.

Writing was invented in the range of 3300-3400BCE and the earliest coherent texts of any kind we have are from 2600BCE at the earliest. We only have archaeological evidence of anything that happened before that, and there’s nothing special about 4241BCE in that record. (The nature of archaeology makes dating prehistoric things with that level of precision risible anyway.)

There’s a small problem in that blog: it has some grotesque inaccuracies.

The part that stood out for me, though, was this:

The fourth part of my system is the seven-day work week. Different cultures around the world have had a different number of days of a week. The ancient Chinese had eight for example. The Aztecs had weeks defined as having five days. I technically go by six. It’s just easier. You will find it easier too, I guarantee that. Whose idea was it to have a prime number as the number of week days?

The ancient Chinese had a bewildering number of calendar systems with highly variable lengths of week-equivalents. They had 10-day weeks, 12-day weeks, 7-day weeks, 9-day weeks, indeed practically every number you can conceive of has been a week length in ancient Chinese calendar systems except—ironically enough—8-day weeks.

Incidentally, time systems in China are also horrifically complicated with divisions of the day into 15 “hours” (but only divided such during daytime hours) in very ancient times. Later a bizarre system that had daytime divisions of 10(更), 12(时), 60(点), 100(刻), 6000(!)(分), and even 600,000(!!)(秒) all being used at once was in play. (There’s a few more but i can’t be arsed to pull out my reference books; they’re used in marginal cases.)

Why so many units of time? Isn’t it irrational? Not really, no. Because differing activities had more useful divisions of the day for units. It turns out that consistency is very much the hobgoblin of small minds. It’s like how we use different speed measurements today internationally: km/h mostly, but also “nautical miles per hour” in the aircraft industry (alongside Mach numbers), and a few others.

And that is in the end the point here. You use divisions that are useful, not that match someone’s sense of aesthetics. The same applies to time zones (though those get a bit obnoxious when politics interferes: all of China is a single time zone, for example, which is utterly ludicrous). Months are easy to keep track of when they match the moon’s phases. In pre-industrial times in specific that is very valuable for timing key things like planting and harvests. Only 29.5 days is the approximate length of the moon’s cycle, and the year is approximately 365.25 days long. So systems had to become entrenched that either used intercalary features (e.g. the Chinese solilunar calendar), that ignored the issue (e.g. various Arab calendars), or that disconnected the moon from timings (the Western approach). What is obviously not going to work, however, is to just pick arbitrary numbers like “six day weeks” from thin air (hint: 365.25 ÷ 6 = ?), or, even worse, “14 months of 26 days with one or two intercalary days” (what’s 26 ÷ 6 again, and what’s the impact of intercalary days on sliding across months?).

And to tie this back into your selection of 4241BC as the first year of recorded history … recorded how!? Writing was itself only only invented in 3300-3400BCE and the first coherent texts we have stem from about 2600BCE. So how are you picking 4241BC as the first year of recorded history when the absolute earliest actual records we have come from over 1500 years after that point?

Which highlights the danger of using “scientific” and “rational” starting points: they are neither. The BCE/CE system was based on the purported year of Christ’s birth which has two problems: 1. The historicity of Jesus Christ is very much in doubt, and 2. even if he did exist, that year is wrong according to later scholarship: if Christ were actually real, the reported fact that Herod was alive at his birth and that the Romans were doing a census puts his date of birth at 4BCE at the latest. (It could be as early as 7BCE.) Picking some arbitrary starting point based on purported scientific/historic “facts” will (not may, will) fall apart when (and not if) scholarship finds that the date given is wrong. It’s just better to pick a date, imperfect as the choice may be, and standardize on it than try to be “objective” and fuck it up completely like the BCE/CE system did.

If we counted years from the reign of the Yellow Emperor using Sun Yat-sen’s approach, this year would be 4722.

Back when I still did Christmas at all, I converted first to a religion that didn’t have Christmas. It did have, however, a 4-5 day festival of approximately equal importance in the spring. I made sure all my family, friends, and colleagues know that I wouldn’t be celebrating a Christian festival, but that I would be giving gifts in March. Then I’d look at what I got for Christmas and did some cynical calculations.

For each person who gave me a gift, I decided if I wanted to lessen the relationship, keep the relationship as-is, or deepen the relationship. I’d then pick a gift of lesser, equal, or greater value (roughly speaking) and give that response gift in March. The only difference? I’d get them all for a song and a dance in the inevitable post-Christmas bankruptcy sales.

So the best time to get Christmas presents is after Christmas. January and February is when businesses get very desperate (to the point of dissolution for many) and prices drop like concussed bees.

I’m binge-watching The Last of Us this weekend.

I avoided it because it was based on a video game. I was wrong to.

Because he is wrong. It’s that simple, that stark.

His misery comes from within and, worse, it defends itself from ending by insisting he can’t be anything but miserable. He needs professional help, not the help of random people on the Internet.

Good point. I just spotted the name. I should stop engaging.

Joining with the other sex and reproduction is literally the main purpose of all living beings…

This reductive view doesn’t help you and, indeed, probably hurts your chances of getting what you so desperately want.

Drop this focus on sex and, ironically, you’ll have a better chance of having it. We can generally tell when a guy wants us only for orificial insertion; that’s a bigger turn-off than almost anything.

As others have said (that you didn’t bother to respond to) work on yourself before you start working on getting others. And in your case I would strongly recommend getting professional evaluation for possible clinical depression before it literally kills you.

So … you’re comfortable with fascists in your bar?

Congrats! You’ve got a fascist bar!

I mean, you do you and all that shit, but you’ll find that over time all you’re going to get is fascists as normal people bail out on you.

If it’s not only about the sex, why was the sex the first (and only) thing you reached for?

Everytime I find someone and start getting along with them really well. I think to my self this will finally be the year which I stop being a virgin. But it just has not worked out.

So you have someone you get along with really well, and instead of being happy about that you whine (and yes, this is whining) about them not having sex with you.

Your focus is on sex and that’s the only thing you can change: your focus.

You seem nice.

(P.S. Please do go on a binge of downvoting all my posts. You’ll sure show me with that! I won’t even slightly hold it up as a badge of honour, I promise!)

So you’re saying that a Lemmy instance that will let anybody casually reach for profane abuse isn’t going to succeed?

Wow. What an own goal!

Please do go on. Just go on without me. It’s pretty clear you’re exactly the kind of person I dropped Twitter over (and the kind of person that had me never even bother with festering pools of dysentery effluent like Reddit). We shan’t be talking again.

And yet it seems most people avoid spaces that have the conversations you like to have.

Here, try an experiment. Run a Lemmy server with the rule that you can say what you like within the bounds of law. See how many users come to your space. I’ll bet for sure you’ll be bigger than even lemmy.world what with all the people who want to habitually reach for “fuck you” that are being so unnecessarily repressed by so-called civil society!

You’ll sure show us, won’t you!

Most people generally consider those who habitually reach for “fuck you” to be assholes.

Perhaps that’s the problem.

And yet somehow you’re getting banned for saying “fuck you”.

I see a contradiction here.

Whereas from this end, this insistence upon having the “right” to be a vicious boor disgusts me.

And it turns out I’m far more normal in this regard than the opposing stance is, given that social media sites, et al are bleeding users over it.