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I feel this negative outlook isn’t very healthy. Yes there are problems, as there have been at any point in history. That doesn’t mean nothing good happens or can happen.
Go make some nice things happen to yourself or someone else.
No? It’s not 2026 yet
Is the year 2020 part of this century?Edit: am dumb
Yes but 2000 was not.
Sorry, I meant 2000, and thinking about it, yes I guess that’s correct
The first quarter of this century is over at the end of 2025.
2001 was the first year in this century. 2025 is the 25th year in this century. 2100 will be the 100th - and last - year in this century.
(1 was the first year in the first century, 100 was the 100th - and last - year in the first century. That’s why every subsequent century starts on xx1 or xxx1 as well)
So 2000 was still 2nd millennium?
Yes, but most people ignored it and celebrated the new millennium at the end of 1999 and beginning of 2000 anyway.
See this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium#Debate_over_millennium_celebrations
It’s quite interesting. For example Fidel Castro made sure that Cuba celebrated correctly at the end of year 2000. And the U.S. Naval Observatory, official timekeeper for the country, held a party for the new milennium then too.
Can’t we just redefine it? That doesn’t seem reasonable in my mind.
(This is a joke, I know how awful that would go)
We have redefined it. The thing about language is no one controls it. If enough people want to call 2000 the start of the new millennium, then that’s when it was. It’s all arbitrary numbers anyway.
I meant in the sense of “Make Year 1 Year 0, shift all dates back one year, cause a lot of headaches when dealing with dates written down before year shift vs after year shift, but at least the 3rd millennium now properly starts at 2000”, but you have a better point
If we were to redefine it I wonder what way we’d go. Make -1 the first year of the first century and go in consistent 100 year steps from there? Or just accept that the first century and the first millenium are a little shorter than a hundred or a thousand years respectively?
Name “-1” year zero and have that be the start of the first century and millennium, would probably be the most reasonable option.
The idea I originally had would have been to decrement the year numbers, so that year 1 is now y0, 546 is 545 and 2001 is 2000. But changing existing dates is a recipe for nightmares, so let’s not.
With that version you’re still changing some historical dates though, like dates of death for roman emporers. Admittedly it is less of a problem though because you need to do the conversion from their calendar to ours anyway. It’s just that modern documents containing already converted dates would now be off in retrospect.
2000 was the last year of the second millennium and also the first year of the 00s. 2001 was the first year of the third millennium and the second year of the 00s.
That makes it even worse
Yes, the third rolled in 1 jan 2001.
Apparently yeah. In fact, it’s actually easy to tell which years are in the 2nd millenium just by knowing its final year.
But people chose to celebrate the new millenium in 2000 because it’s much more fun to have every single digit in a calendar year change than having only one digit change and calling it “a new millenium”. Also, January 1, 2000 looks and feels so much cooler in my opinion, unless you write it in the dd/mm/yy format (mm/dd/yy wouldn’t make much of a difference), in which case 01/01/01 has that nice satisfying feeling of all variables being the same value.
Apparently yeah. In fact, it’s actually easy to tell which years are in the 2nd millenium just by knowing its final year.
That was the point of my question, the disbelief of “wait, 2k is the last year and not 1999?”
And I think it would be even easier if one could just look at the thousands digit and tell from that. It would be even more easier if the millennia and years and such were all 0-indexed, so you’d have the zeroth millennium spanning 0-999, the first millennium 1000-1999, the 19th century would be 1900-1999…
Would be nice, but unfortunately you can’t change a calendar system the world is so incredibly used to. Just the change from the Julian to the Gregorian was a massive change.
I know, I can but dream…
That doesn’t make much sense though, year 0 does exist. We define our calendar based on Jesus’s supposed birth year, not his birth year+1. Or?
Year 0 doesn’t exist because it’s either before or after Christ being born. What would year 0 be?
There’d also be asymmetry if there was a 0 A.D. but no 0 B.C. (as that wouldn’t really make sense)
Yeah, year 0 doesn’t exist, it goes 1BC -> 1AD
Only programmers start counting with 0. All the normal people start with 1.
You mean normal people start at 0 and non-programmers sometimes start at 1?
How many apples are you holding right now? Is it less than 1? How would you count that?
When I write that normal people start at 1 then I mean that normal people start at 1, funny enough. Also, I am currently holding 0 apples. No need to start counting.
Sounds like you started counting at zero apples.
My dude, only 24 years have elapsed in this century https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_century, the 25th year has only just started. Try again next year.
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I like having a smart phone, but maybe that’s just me.
Obviously not everywhere but marriage equality made great strides.
I met and married an amazing person this century, so I’ve got that going for me which is nice.
Congratulations! Same here!
Congratulations! Same here!
Congratulations! Same here!
Conservatism has dragged America fifty years behind in tech progress and wasted all of our resources on destruction over building. I wish this country would get fucking NUKED. America is a dismal failure on every level
Describe the 50 years of tech progress that we’ve lost or you’re full of shit.
We could be driving electric cars and having solar panels everywhere.
We could be having the fastest wifi network.
We could have high speed trains.
Medical advances as well. I don’t even want to go into the vaccine territory.
All of those things were considered problematic by the old guard, who conservatives supported. One side continues to protect the yacht owning class. Conservatives would still be fighting marijuana if the rest of the population didn’t tell them to fuck off.
And if you think this is all wishy-washy speculation, get the fuck out of America for a minute and look around the rest of the world. American cities are no where near other international cities in terms of living, quality, tech, support. You have to be dumb as fuck to not recognize how often Conservatives vote against tech initiatives to line their own pockets.
Ehh looking at semi conductor & solar panel production I see what this persons saying. “Losing 50 years of tech progress” isn’t quite accurate definitely, however the US has decayed its tech lead compared to the space race era, for example.
The thing about losing progress is you can’t know where you would be if priorities were different.
If the same amount of passion and resources was poured into the space program for the last 50 years as it was during the moon landing we would certainly be much further ahead, but no one would be able to tell you where would we be.
How do expect someone to describe something that hasn’t been invented yet?
The thing about losing progress is you can’t know where you would be if priorities were different.
There are some cases where you can know where you’d be if priorities were different. Hence the most frustrating graph in the world:
Best graph I’ve ever seen
Extreme poverty worldwide is down from 38% to 8.5% since 2000. Global median income has doubled in that period. And yes, that’s adjusted for inflation.
Oh, and renewable energy generation as share of the global energy mix has consistently beaten expectations during that period, too. Solar, specifically.
Bullshit. Global inequality is on a constant rise. The extreme poverty crap is propaganda by the world bank who lowered the poverty line for no other reason than to make capitalism look good.
That stuff about renewaple energy is simple greenwashing. The only year since 2000 when CO2 emissions went down was in 2020 thanks to COVID.
Doesn’t look that way to me, given that the change has been pretty smooth and shows up on specific regions and adjusting for outliers and inflation (and matches the rise in median income).
More importantly, it’s not incompatible with global inequality on the rise. Different stats measure different things.
Renewable energy beating expectations is the opposite of greenwashing, it specifically compares actual generated renewable energy against previous projections. If you want to poke holes into it for the sake of… denying anything good has ever happened, I guess? you should instead point out at how disproportionately that growth is driven by China.
And again, that’s perfectly compatible with CO2 emissions going up. Different stats, different things.
And again, that’s perfectly compatible with CO2 emissions going up. Different stats, different things.
The only reason to care about renewables is if they prevent climate change. Why am I supposed to be happy solar panels exist, if CO2 emissions are increasing?
Because those are two separate parameters. Less solar panels don’t mean less CO emissions, they mean more. You are cutting down on one metric even if you’re not reversing the trend.
That is an absurd question, by the way. Why are you supposed to be unhappy we’re making more solar panels in this scenario? What is the downside?
I don’t know too much about the median income, but I’d wager that it was mostly because the really poor country got a bit better off. Also, at least according to Wikipedia, the latest definition of extreme poverty was made in 2015, before the recent inflation spikes.
And “beat expectations” is just a non-statement. What were the expectations? And how does it matter if we’re still on track for a climate catastrophe? We’ve crossed the 1.5°C target.
but I’d wager that it was mostly because the really poor country got a bit better off.
That’s what happened. The bimodal world income distribution has become unimodal as the working class of East Asia has seen a lot of improvement. Inequality in the first world went up since a lot of working class jobs left their countries while the wealthy were able to get richer.
Hey, I’ll take poor countries getting a bit better off before any benefits to any American any day. That’s good news, so point made.
As for “beat expectations”, I was going off a specific study showing multiple official forecasts and how far behind actuals they all were, but unfortunately I don’t have it handy.
But the data is the data, so here’s another example from an Australian blog post: https://evcricketenergy.wordpress.com/2025/01/02/2030-renewables-in-australia-forecast-2024-update/
And some data on renewable generation overtaking fossil fuels in the EU: https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2024/09/Report_Wind-and-solar-overtake-EU-fossil-fuels-in-the-first-half-of-2024.pdf
I don’t know why people look at this as such a binary. Climate change isn’t an on-off switch. This has to happen regardless. Faster is better than slower. Climate catastrophe or not, we need to figure this out, it’s about how bad things get before we do and how much extra work and impact we have to deal with from going over certain thresholds. Going over 1.5 doesn’t mean we can give up now, we still have to get the renewable transition done, even if now we also have to deal with a bunch of humanitarian crises that wouldn’t have happened had we transitioned sooner.
Yes. The fediverse wouldn’t get much awareness if it wasn’t for Twitter and Reddit absolutely shutting themselves. I wouldn’t even be here if that never happened.
That’s technology in a nutshell. We moved off of one platform to join another.
If we didn’t, we’d still be sending each other messages on AOL and join chatrooms to have discussions.
At least this time around there’s no central server that can be shut down killing everything that exists in that platform. Obviously AOL Instant Messenger and many other popular messaging apps from that era suffered from this exact fate.
Has anything good even happened?
Yes, definitely. Americans are realizing that their country is shit too and they are not exempt from falling into an Autocracy. Maybe that will teach them a bit more compassion with other people around the world and will stop the arrogance of bringing “democracy” (because it’s “clearly the best form of state”) to countries who don’t want it.
The american system is not a guarantee for the wellbeing of the people, and now that americans finally understand that, we can start actual constructive dialogue based on mutual respect, i hope.
Lol, ok, they totally didn’t realize their country used to be good and will vote for anything thatll fix it, or at least, shake the fucking jar.
Lord of the Rings (movies) came out this century. Let’s give credit where credit is due.
JRR Tolkien would like a word.
I know the sorts of words he likes, and I just haven’t got that kind of spare time right now.
It feels to me like it all went to shit when Bush stole the election from Gore - using the Supreme Court I might add.
I’m 37 this year and I remember being a kid at a time when we were all more optimistic and well off. When a middle class existed in the west. When we were told the world was our oyster and we just had to study and work hard to get anything we wanted. That piece of advice was valid to a handful of us millenials, diminishing to those born in the 1990s. My husband is 31 and has never been on an overseas holiday - the differences in privilege just being born 6 years later are stark and upsetting. It’s only gotten worse for younger generations and the people who did all this are cackling as they push their boots in harder on our throats.
As a pacifist I just don’t know what to do anymore other than try to live my life among the damned and hope it resolves itself before something comes for me and mine.
Born 1980 remember all the privilege we had before that day. Hell at 19 I lived on my own in one bedroom apartment. I remember working at Walmart in my 20’s and still afford to have an apartment of my own. Started to go down hill in 2006. Before then I never needed roommates or someone else help pay bills.
Even at 22 making 6.25 an hour and had a studio apartment. You couldn’t do that now on 12 an hour. Not without living in a getto.
Well, that was a soft coup, so yes.
They literally ignored election results.
yeah i;m 41 and remember when i could buy ammunition without a question asked, when i was 10, and canadian. ive been fucking mad at the federal government for 30 fucking years over their demanding i give an open search warrant to the cops to legally possess what was over the counter to me as a child. “what radicalized me” fucking federal Liberals
Well yeah, I’ve got a better job and my country inflation is finally going down. That’s good in my books!
I ate a really nice curry in 2014.
I learned how to make a really nice curry.
And that places closed a week later because of health code violations right?
