(Warning: there's no point to this post, and it's long. It's just, to me, interesting to ponder)
I've been working on my budget a lot recently, and the way our calendar is set up is really screwing me up, because I (like most people, I imagine) budget monthly but get paid biweekly. A simple example: if I spend exactly $30 per paycheck on something like health insurance, then there will be 10 months where I'll spend $60 and 2 months where I'll spend $90. So my monthly budget averages out to $65, but I can't possibly ever be
on budget, even if I'm able to perfectly anticipate my expenses. The example isn't
perfectly general but you see the point.
Restructuring the calendar (ever) would be like switching America to metric by March, or like switching society to a base 8 number system. It just won't happen. It's kind of weird to think that by the year 8000, we won't have been able to improve upon our calendar. But let's pretend (I should go into the base 8 thing sometime) that our little group was in charge of a new one and whatever we wanted would be approved. What would it look like?
I assume that an ideal calendar system would have the same number of days in each week and weeks in each month (and thus days in each month). I know there aren't a lot of programmers here, but just think about how much easier calendars and scheduling would be if, say, there were 360 days in a year (the prime factorization is 2*2*2*3*3*5).
You could have 6 days in a week, 5 weeks (thus 30 days) in a month, and 12 months in the year.
You could have 9 days in a week, 4 weeks in a month, and 10 months in a year.
You could have 8 days in a week, 5 weeks in a month, and 9 months in a year.
As long as the product in this format is 360 (or 72*5), you're golden!
(Better yet - imagine something like 256 days. 8 days in a week, 4 weeks in a month, 8 months in a year. Done. Added bonus: still a round number of months per season/quarter)
Unfortunately, we have
365 days. Prime factorization? 73*5. Or, for our purposes, 73*5*1. Which means the same format above still applies, but your only three options for inputs are 73, 5, and 1. I suppose the best solution that fits our "model" is 5 days in a week, 73 weeks in a month, and 1 month in a year (i.e., no more things called "months"). (In retrospect, have 12 months in which the last month has an extra week probably wouldn't be the end of the world, but again defeats the purpose)
So that's pretty ugly. But you know Tuesday would always been on 27th of every year, or however you aligned it. One might keep track of dates with labels like "Monday 49".
All-in-all, my opinion is that this would be an improvement over the current calendar and the best possible choice.
There are two things that
really screw this up, however. The first is weekends/work weeks. What are we going to do now - work four days and then take one off every week? Aside from the fact that this means an increase in work days (from 71% to 80%, though we could add more holidays ... side thought: as technology increases our productivity/net worth, we should be taking more time off anyway), it kind of defeats the purpose of the weekend. No traveling to see family, and who's going to do yard work on a "Saturday" if they have to work the next day, every week? (You could solve this by moving to a ten-day week, but then you'd have 36.5 weeks, which at least would even everything out every other year)
The real pain, however, is leap days. The whole point of my calendar is regularity. The last day of the week is always a number divisible by 5 in every year. So how do you handle leap days? My only thought is this: say the 5th and final day of the week is "Friday" - I guess you'd just end leap years with a "second Friday". But that defeats the whole purpose as well. Of course, there's no way to get around the leap year problem - you could go to a 400-year calendar, but even then it's not quite perfect.
I don't feel like writing any more on this.
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