To be fair, as I’m sure you know, there’s only one way to have every century in the Common Era actually contain one hundred years: namely, by assigning the beginning of every new century to the start of Year xx01 rather than Year xx00. Which is why, AFAICT, pretty much all governments and scientific organizations worldwide concur that the 21st century began at the start of 2001.
As far as I’m concerned, the fact that people not unreasonably like to celebrate the start of a new century a bit prematurely, at the moment the hundreds digit rolls over, is a separate issue from the official designation of century boundaries.
(And Slow_Moving_Vehicle, don’t think I didn’t see that; your name has been written down in the detention book.)
If you really want to relitigate this… cite? Why would any government or scientific organization care about this?
For what purpose does it matter that each CE century has exactly 100 years? Conventionally there is no year zero, but so what? It’s not as though somebody started a stopwatch on January 1st year 0001 and that anything depends on the precise elapsed time. No real historical event even happened at the Jan 1st 0001 reference point that we use to label dates, it’s an arbitrary reference that was invented retrospectively. If you can think of some purpose for which the elapsed time must be exact (I can’t think of one), just say that BCE 0001 is also called CE 0000. What difference would it make? What matters with dates is just that we have consistent labeling.
This entire aside is pointless because the actual, genuine start of the 21st century, the inflection point whose effects will persist for the rest of the century, was September 11, 2001.
I hadn’t heard about him in decades either until I did a double take watching a YouTube video on the history of Star Citizen (still yet to be released after over half a billion dollars in crowdfunding and 12 years in development) a couple of years ago. Apparently, he was spending his time in flame wars with Chris Roberts about his inability to deliver on his promised game. Completely oblivious to any sense of irony.
Yeah. While Derek Smart didn’t precisely cover himself in glory, at least he was engaged with someone who still makes him look well-adjusted (relatively).
And then he makes common cause with Elmo. I just don’t know what to think any more.
He put up a poll asking if he should, saying he would abide by the results. But when the results were “yes,” he came up with excuses.
The first was that he’d have to find someone who was stupid enough to take the job first. But then later someone told him that only Twitter Blue votes should count–as everyone else could just be trolls. And Musk agreed with that.
In other words, he’s already reneged on stepping down, AFAICT.
I suppose in a narrow sense that’s true due to the various oaths one must take to attain citizenship, but can you really betray a country you never had any real loyalty towards in the first place and only joined for personal advancement?
I take exception to the phrase “personal advancement”, which is usually associated with noble and productive objectives, and would substitute the phrase “rapacious personal gain”, particularly in light of the egregiously unethical and totally self-interested havoc that Elmo is wreaking at Twitter.
