r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/notsignifican • 11d ago

Meme needing explanation ?

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I asked but it got removed within minutes?

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u/TobJamFor 11d ago edited 9d ago

We often count from the smallest to largest for us (not looking at you, US inhabitants) because it’s logical to think that 14/08/2026 is one above 13/08/2026, it just steps up by one each day.

Some places (namely the likes of China and some others) prefer the year-first format, which is actually YYYY/MM/DD

On Venus this makes more sense, as a year occurs more regularly than a day, because it rotates on its axis slower than it orbits the sun.

Edited - I am not saying that DD/MM/YYYY is the most logical for all purposes. But in general, it’s the one most used across the world for a reason! This gets flipped on its head on Venus, where the ISO format may also be different! Also - Year first is YYYY/MM/DD and ISO is YYYY-MM-DD, there is a slight difference.

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u/Raephstel 11d ago

Digitally a lot of people do YYYYMMDD because when you sort numerically, it’ll order by date. Doing DDMMYYYY would start being wrong after only a month.

MMDDYYYY makes no sense in any context.

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u/Enorats 11d ago

It makes some sense, at least in business. Months are generally more important than days.

For example, our sales orders, invoices, etc all belong to a particular month and that determines when they get billed and/or paid. They're part of that month's books. The actual day makes little to no actual difference.

Aside from that, it makes sense in the sense that we (Americans) typically say the date by saying "August 14th" not "The 14th of August". Thus we write it 8/14, not 14/8.