
American date format leads to arrest in Spain - edent
https://english.elpais.com/spanish_news/2020-09-08/the-spanish-family-wrongly-accused-of-child-pornography-due-to-a-mistake-reading-a-date.html
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amiantos
We could all save a lot of time and trouble if we’d just normalize all
cultures to a YYYY-MM-DD format. Sorts better as well as just being less
ambiguous due to unfamiliarity meaning no assumptions will be applied by
anybody. I only date things this way, at least digitally, but I should
probably start doing it in writing as well.

Also this format prioritizes what is more important to you if you are an
amnesiac or someone stuck time traveling at random.

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kgwgk
Actual headline: "The Spanish family wrongly accused of child pornography due
to a mistake reading a date"

"An alert from a US organization followed American month-day-year usage, but
this was misread by investigators in Spain. As a result, four people went
through a nightmare situation"

~~~
baby
The amount of mistakes that must have been due to the American date format
would probably be a good research topic. I know I’ve myself done countless
mistakes due to it.

As much as I can, I use the yyyy-mm-dd format which is always unambiguous.

~~~
__d
I also adopted the yyyy-mm-dd format, some time in the 90's. I later moved
from Australia (dd-mm-yyyy) to the US (mm-dd-yyyy) and continued to use yyyy-
mm-dd during my time there.

I believe yyyy-mm-dd is the usual format in Japan, but I'm amazed that it
hasn't seen more popular adoption worldwide, given the difficulties it solves.

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supernova87a
I also agree that adopting yyyy-mm-dd just reduces ambiguity.

However, it is an interesting linguistic observation that the way people say
dates influences how they prefer to write them. And I know it's basically a
religious argument, but I prefer the American way.

Saying "we'll schedule that for October 10th", or "let's meet on September
18th" you get an idea from the first words when roughly it's going to be (Oct,
Sep), and then the specific.

The only time we seem to use the day number first is when we celebrate "the
4th of July".

The European way -- or at least British way -- they say "we'll schedule that
for the 10th of October". If you had to cut that sentence off before you
completed it, you would be left asking... which month in general are we
talking about?

Anyway, the way people are used to saying the words definitely seems to
translate into how they express it in writing.

~~~
sabellito
Having a date format that's different from the rest of the whole world to
optmise for the case of being cutoff when speaking doesn't sound super
reasonable.

~~~
supernova87a
Well, I don't _really_ mean it's for the protection of the case that your
sentence gets cut off -- when is that going to happen in practice. I meant in
terms of word order when thinking about the concept of date from general to
specific, (I at least) think it's more logical. And in yyyy-mm-dd, it comes
first.

But, yes it is only a convention. We do lots of other things in society
without similar rationale.

~~~
function_seven
It's like how calculators and telephone keypads are opposite. Each one feels
natural in its own domain, but weird if used for the other purpose (i.e. Try
dialing a phone number you're used to dialing all the time, but on a
calculator. You can do it, but it don't feel right)

With identifiers, we sometimes go from specific>general. Street addresses
start with the house number first, then street, then city, state, etc.

Domain names are the same. Most specific first, general TLD last.

But then there are directory paths, (drive > folder > file), phone numbers
(country > area > exchange > subscriber), and legal citations (code/title >
chapter > section > paragraph > etc.)

Which makes the American date format truly an outlier. 2020-09-13 seems right
to me, but I think I prefer 13 SEP 2020. It's more aesthetic I think, and it
also recognizes that there is no month called "9". Days and years are
naturally numbered, but months have names.

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mro_name
Soon will be the global day celebrating standards. ISO-standardised to Oct,
14th.

Except for the US, ANSI set it to Oct, 22nd.

[https://blog.fefe.de/?ts=a1a4e701](https://blog.fefe.de/?ts=a1a4e701)

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mro_name
Once there was a nice cartoon at iso.ch:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20030305043709/http://www.iso.ch/...](http://web.archive.org/web/20030305043709/http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/prods-
services/popstds/datesandtime.html)

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orev
For computer stuff YYYY-MM-DD makes the most sense usually, but for human
stuff I prefer DD-MMM-YYYY. That gives you the day first, then the three
letter month abbreviation, then the year. It’s still easy enough to understand
for people while not being overly technical.

~~~
mro_name
for human reception I always add the day of week.

A very strong hint for personal planning (Thu? Never have time on Thus).

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paledot
There's an idea. MM/DD/YYYY (or worse, YY) should be an indictable offence.

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dannyw
The result of this is a series of mistakes and continued negligence, not
simply a date format error.

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pella
The ideal birthday is > 12

