amadeus
burning out his fuse out here alone
Which is in part why I wouldn’t use it to refer back to 2000. Check back in 25 years.
I don’t think it’s changed all that much. A little crappier in some aspects, but can’t do much about it!
When was the turn of the century?
- Thread starter Quintillus
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Marla_Singer
United in diversity
Seeing things this way, we could argue exactly the same about the evolution of the world from 1900 to 1925.
25 years ago, China was well on the trajectory to becoming its current self. Its economic and political system has been the same since the 1980s.
Likewise, there hasn't been much change in our ie. Western economic and political system since then, nor for that matter the entire world's. Economically, socially, politically, the world of 2024 looks very similar to the world of 1999, or you could have extrapolated it from trends at the time.
Democratic models were being challenged then too, we've just forgotten. This paper was published in 1990.
The biggest change in the last 25 years is the smartphone. But that hasn't lead (so far) to any significant shake up of our political and economic system, except accelerate existing (IMHO mostly negative) trends in society.
Compared to 1900 - 1925, when absolute/semi-constitutional monarchies went from ruling most of the world's population to being almost non-existent, one of which replaced by the world's first communist state, and another by the world's first* Muslim republic. Following a global war that killed 1% of the world population.
*not counting Azerbaijan's five minutes of independence
Moff Jerjerrod
Deity
Yes kind of sort of. I think it's a fair statement to say year "zero" does not exist. But if zero is a point on the x axis then as time progresses we are now progressing towards completing year 1. The time period from completed year 1 to incomplete year 2 is indeed the start of year 2.
I hope that makes sense. In short, think of the progression of time as a point moving along the x axis of an imaginary line in the positive (or right) direction.
Marla_Singer
United in diversity
China has totally transformed in the past 25 years like no other country ever did in such a short period of time. They entirely built hundreds of cities with all their freeways, subways, airports and all other infrastructures, they built thousands of kilometers of high speed rail, basically everything. From a country that had a GDP lower than France, it has now grown to a GDP in purchasing power parity that is even higher than the US. Also, Xi Jinping became far more authoritarian than what existed at the time of Jiang Zemin, basically naming himself leader for life.
When it goes about the Western world, there's been Brexit, Donald Trump, the attack on the US capitol. There's also been Russia launching a full-scale invasion of a foreign country, the return of high intensity war in Europe. Technology-wise, we were still getting informed using the same sources during the 20th century, a limited number of newspaper and TV channels. Nowadays, the way we inform ourselves has totally changed. These are not minor changes, and aren't unrelated to the events I mentioned.
The word is very different from the one from 2000. I would even argue that the balance between major powers has more changed now than it did from 1900 to 1925. In 1900, Britain was ruling a largest colonial Empire ever, with Germany challenging it. That was still the case in 1925, despite the world war. Yet in 2000, the US was by far the most powerful country, behaving like world police, dominating the global world order. It is now badly challenged by China.
EDIT: Just to be clear, we can indeed argue that the world has more changed between 1900 and 1925 than between 1999 and 2024, my point was rather that the world did change a lot in the past 25 years and I'm actually surprized it could be argued otherwise.
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Counting years is one way to recognize a change in labeling. After 100 years have passed, a new century begins. After 1000 years have passed, a new millennium begins. 1 to 100; 101 to 200; 1901 to 2000; etc.
But one can also look at from a digital stand point: the 200s; the 1500s, the 2000s etc. In this view one is looking at the collection of years with the same starting digit. 200-299 are the Two hundreds. The 19th C is the years that begin with 19xx.
Neither is wrong. They each just use a different method of categorizing the years. The confusion only comes when the first one or two digits change and if the people are using different systems. A different method of counting has been the name of a king and the year of his reign or the Mayan long count calendar coupled with kingly reigns. If one uses a continuous counting system without groupings, the problem goes away. We are in the year 1954 since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans. Pick a starting point and keep counting. No confusion. Our ongoing human obsession with categorizing and grouping creates the problem.
If I said I was writing a book on 18th C China, would anyone have a problem understanding my topic? Probably not. Would I include events of 1800 or 1901? Nobody would care. The precision demanded in this thread seems mostly about when to party. The answer to that is: have two parties. Out with the old and in with the new.
But one can also look at from a digital stand point: the 200s; the 1500s, the 2000s etc. In this view one is looking at the collection of years with the same starting digit. 200-299 are the Two hundreds. The 19th C is the years that begin with 19xx.
Neither is wrong. They each just use a different method of categorizing the years. The confusion only comes when the first one or two digits change and if the people are using different systems. A different method of counting has been the name of a king and the year of his reign or the Mayan long count calendar coupled with kingly reigns. If one uses a continuous counting system without groupings, the problem goes away. We are in the year 1954 since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans. Pick a starting point and keep counting. No confusion. Our ongoing human obsession with categorizing and grouping creates the problem.
If I said I was writing a book on 18th C China, would anyone have a problem understanding my topic? Probably not. Would I include events of 1800 or 1901? Nobody would care. The precision demanded in this thread seems mostly about when to party. The answer to that is: have two parties. Out with the old and in with the new.
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Moff Jerjerrod
Deity
Precision to party you say?
They say, two thousand, zero zero. Party over. Oops, out of time. But tonight. I'm going to party, like it's 1999.
They say, two thousand, zero zero. Party over. Oops, out of time. But tonight. I'm going to party, like it's 1999.
Apart from the phones, I'll grant one other thing that has changed dramatically over my lifetime, particularly in the West, that hasn't been mentioned yet which is homosexual relationships going from exoticised at best to illegal at worst, to being grudgingly tolerated at worst to completely normal at best. You could argue it's a natural consequence of the sexual revolution of the 60s but I don't think it was necessarily so; certainly it didn't have to happen so rapidly.
That is a massive and rapid change for the ~10% who this directly affects (including me!) so I think it should be mentioned.
However, and I swear I'm not trying to be difficult here, my real genuine honest-to-god perspective is that, overall, big picture view, comparing the change I've witnessed over my lifetime (which coincidentally is about 30 years) with the changes I've read about prior, I'm forced to conclude that not much changed by comparison.
I'm probably not as surprised that people think the world has changed a lot in the last 30 years, as you do the reverse. Listing these big headline-grabbing events, Trump, Brexit, Ukraine, the Capitol, it sounds dramatic, but what has actually changed categorically, about the way we live and work and are governed? There are some huge local effects, of course: Ukraine 2024 is a completely different place even to Ukraine 2021, and Russian oligarchs with assets in the Mediterranean have to be a bit cleverer. But for the vast majority who are not directly affected, it's been business as usual.
It's not even clear how long Russia would remain ostracised from polite company. Russian athletes will compete in Paris, just not under the Russian flag, but Russian doping practices meant they were doing that anyway even before 2022.
And it's not just the West, I've lived in Thailand, and keeping track of the changes there. Besides it being marginally earlier to travel around certain parts of Bangkok now (because metro) and everyone now being addicted to their phones, what has changed? Not very much. Some progress has been made; people live a bit longer, have a bit more money, are a bit fatter. Comparing now to when I was a little kid, the biggest changes are same sex marriage and weed being legal.
Even when we talk about the events in the United States, I'm not sure if the Republican Party of 2024 is fundamentally that much
The world order is being "challenged" a lot, but aside from which players are capturing the headlines at any given time, how has the world order actually changed?
Is the US really now less of a "world police" than in the 1990s, during which among relative successes in the Balkans, it experienced defeat in Somalia, was "challenged" by Islamic terrorists, failed to prevent pro-Russian seperatists in Moldova and Georgia, failed to stabilise Haiti, failed to bring about a Two-State Solution, and didn't even try to prevent genocide in Rwanda?
Even in the way we inform ourselves, the dominant media have changed, we're all addicted to phones now, but what about the players? In my own country, the news articles people share on social media are from the same companies that dominated the news business thirty years ago, except they dominate even more now.
I guess if I were to moderate my position it would be "yes there has been a lot of changes in the last 30 years, but nowhere near as much as some people hyped it up to have been", and ultimately I agree with Amadeus' original comment that 2000 doesn't feel like a distant and unfamiliar past. It certainly isn't to me.
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It's a very particular system. You can of course set it to be "distance between a and b= Ia-bI if a,b on the same half-line and [a-b]-1 if a,b on opposite half-lines". But it's a one-off, like saying your uncle will bring you 2 presents each time he visits is a one-off and not a function which ties to other stuff (juxtapose to the perimeter of a parallelogram being 2 times the combined length of non-parallel sides) ; both are the function F(x)=2x, only one has a family of tied functions.
At least they weren't grandiose with their particular function's relation to the standard line of rational numbers. Imagine if it had more imposing stuff, since god's son needs space to breathe between commoner periods.
At least they weren't grandiose with their particular function's relation to the standard line of rational numbers. Imagine if it had more imposing stuff, since god's son needs space to breathe between commoner periods.
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"Turn of the century" will be slang for whatever nefarity I am able to accomplish once I hit the appropriate age.
PPQ_Purple
Purple Cube
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If you will allow me to give you some perspective.
When I was born, a telephone looked like this, the world looked like this and you could still get on an airplane without taking off your underpants for security. The internet existed, kind of, sort of. But it looked like this and you paid for it by the hour.
A decade later, in the 90's, phones looked like this, the red blob on the map was gone and the blue one turned out to be the true evil empire after all. And you could still get on an airplane without taking one for the team. My first PC had a singe core, 256 MB of RAM and a 20GB hard drive. It cost me the equivalent of several thousand euros today but it had internet with actual images. You still had to pay for it by the hour.
These days everyone walks around with a combination radio, supercomputer and camera in their pocket. You have internet on the move, electronics in everything short of toilet paper and not one but several generations of people who have grown up without ever seeing a world without mobile devices or cheap fast internet connections.
As far as I am concerned, the worlds of the 1980's and 90's and that of today might as well be different planets.
I think we can say that the differences in more recent years (eg 80s-now) are massive on scale/complexity of existent types and relatively few regarding new type (AI is essentially - not nominally - a new type, also what we now see as the internet), while those between 1900-1940 were more strikingly about new type, with people witnessing airplanes for the first time, essentially also automobiles, various other prototype machines. But the distance in understanding has massively increased, since to be in research/understand current research you have to cover more ground than in the past and this obviously only increases with time.
As for a comparison of the past with the present, in regards to importance, in my view the past is almost always inferior: only after massive collapses you will see periods of regression.
As for a comparison of the past with the present, in regards to importance, in my view the past is almost always inferior: only after massive collapses you will see periods of regression.
The common denominator between then (choose any date) and now is that people are essentially the same and distorting, enhancing, misusing, and exploiting all of the social and technology changes over the time frame.
PPQ_Purple
Purple Cube
- Joined
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I get it, I just don't really agree.
I honestly think you all underestimate just how much life has changed in the last 25 to 30 years. Which makes sense since we are just so used to things that we have forgotten how they used to be.
Someone from the 1890's would have been familiar with balloons and airships. So whilst he might have been surprised at the pace of development the idea that there will one day be a passenger airplane wouldn't have been that far fetched. So is the transition from balloons, which had proven flight was possible centuries ago to airplanes really any more or less transformational an experience than the transition from a world where you might have had a pocket calculator to one where you have a supercomputer with instant communication to everyone in the entire world in your pocket? I would argue they are about the same.
Really, I would say that in terms of just how much life transformed for the average person in those periods we are on track to being about equal.
About the only major difference is that the first half of the 20th century saw the old world order of European empires torn down in favor of a new order of the Soviet and American ones instead. Where as we had that change in the 1990's instead so a couple decades ahead of schedule for a perfect match.
Honestly I would disagree. Whilst many things are indeed better today than they were yesteryear and this is an overall historical trend it is far from universal. Barring periods of massive catastrophic collapse like the black death every generation could and still can point at things in the last that were objectively better.
For example, I find that the overall state of the world was much better back in the days when the world was multi polar which forced both of the evil empires had to at least pay lip service to playing nice. And when you didn't just have one world bully going around knocking nations down for fun and profit with impunity.
Equally, I find that the overall culture of the world was much better in the early days of the internet before the whole thing was so heavily monetized and turned into a giant spiderweb meant to harvest our personal information for profit. And of course, the less is said about the modern internet culture of rampant uncontrolled wild hate activism the better.
And let's not forget the glory days of being able to leave your home and go out and actually be unreachable and thus free to enjoy your free time without your boss, annoying acquaintances or anyone else being able to contact you.
And of course the fact that goods these days, whilst indeed more feature rich, have paid for this by becoming ever more impossible to maintain and repair on your own.
I could go on but I think you get my point.
The common denominator in all of human history is indeed that human nature does not change. We are, have been and remain the same evil hairless monkeys that came off that branch one day in Africa and decided to start burning each others trees down for fun.
warpus
In pork I trust
What I mean is that the year 0 AD just doesn't exist, when the year 1 BC ended, we jumped right to 1 AD. So the first decade and century of the millennium started on the first day of 1 AD, the second decade started on the first day of 11 AD, etc.
So that's the thing, there is no point 0 on our time axis.
There is no biblical authority for BC/AD; it was created over 500 years after the events described in the Christian New Testament and was not accepted usage until after another 500 years had passed. The use of BCE/CE certainly has become more common in recent years but it is not a new invention of the "politically correct" nor is it even all that new; the use of "common era" in place of A.D. first appears in German in the 17th century CE and in English in the 18th. The use of this designation in dating has nothing to do with "removing Christ from the calendar" and everything to do with accuracy when dealing with historical events and including people of all faiths in discussions of history.
The Hebrew calendar, still in use, is based on a concept known as Anno Mundi ("in the year of the world") which dates events from the beginning of the creation of the earth as calculated through scripture. Ancient civilizations such as Mesopotamia and Egypt based their calendars on the reigns of kings or the cycles of the seasons as set by the gods. In Mesopotamia, for example, one might date an event as "five years from the reign of King Shulgi" and, in Egypt, as "three years after the last Opet Festival of Ramesses who was the second of that name" or, otherwise, "In the 10th year of the reign of Ramesses who triumphed at Kadesh". This method of dating was continued by the Romans who counted their years according to three different systems in different eras: from the founding of Rome, by which consuls were in power, and by which emperors ruled at a given time.
Julius Caesar (100-44 BCE) reformed the calendar and renamed the months during his reign (49-44 BCE). This calendar remained in use, with periodic revisions, until 1582 CE when Pope Gregory XIII instituted the Gregorian Calendar still in use in the present day. Christians used the Anno Mundi calendar and the Roman calendar in the early years of the faith. In c. 525 CE, however, a new concept in dating was introduced by a Christian monk named Dionysius Exiguus (c. 470-544 CE) which provided the groundwork for the later dating system of BC/AD.
Dionysius invented the concept of Anno Domini ("in the year of our Lord") in an attempt to stabilize the date of the celebration of Easter. At the time he was working on this problem, Christians of the influential church of Alexandria were dating events from the beginning of the reign of the Roman emperor Diocletian (284 CE) who persecuted members of the new faith. Dionysius was seeking to bring the eastern and western churches into agreement on a single day on which all Christians would celebrate Easter.
This goal had been decided upon by Constantine the Great at the Council of Nicea in 325 CE but had not yet been met. Toward this end, Dionysius changed the system of dating years from the Roman system and the Alexandrian system to his own in which his present Christian era dated from the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. His choice also eliminated another problem he found troubling: dating events from the reign of an emperor who had killed so many Christians.
www.worldhistory.org
The Hebrew calendar, still in use, is based on a concept known as Anno Mundi ("in the year of the world") which dates events from the beginning of the creation of the earth as calculated through scripture. Ancient civilizations such as Mesopotamia and Egypt based their calendars on the reigns of kings or the cycles of the seasons as set by the gods. In Mesopotamia, for example, one might date an event as "five years from the reign of King Shulgi" and, in Egypt, as "three years after the last Opet Festival of Ramesses who was the second of that name" or, otherwise, "In the 10th year of the reign of Ramesses who triumphed at Kadesh". This method of dating was continued by the Romans who counted their years according to three different systems in different eras: from the founding of Rome, by which consuls were in power, and by which emperors ruled at a given time.
Julius Caesar (100-44 BCE) reformed the calendar and renamed the months during his reign (49-44 BCE). This calendar remained in use, with periodic revisions, until 1582 CE when Pope Gregory XIII instituted the Gregorian Calendar still in use in the present day. Christians used the Anno Mundi calendar and the Roman calendar in the early years of the faith. In c. 525 CE, however, a new concept in dating was introduced by a Christian monk named Dionysius Exiguus (c. 470-544 CE) which provided the groundwork for the later dating system of BC/AD.
Dionysius invented the concept of Anno Domini ("in the year of our Lord") in an attempt to stabilize the date of the celebration of Easter. At the time he was working on this problem, Christians of the influential church of Alexandria were dating events from the beginning of the reign of the Roman emperor Diocletian (284 CE) who persecuted members of the new faith. Dionysius was seeking to bring the eastern and western churches into agreement on a single day on which all Christians would celebrate Easter.
This goal had been decided upon by Constantine the Great at the Council of Nicea in 325 CE but had not yet been met. Toward this end, Dionysius changed the system of dating years from the Roman system and the Alexandrian system to his own in which his present Christian era dated from the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. His choice also eliminated another problem he found troubling: dating events from the reign of an emperor who had killed so many Christians.
The Origin & History of the BCE/CE Dating System
The BCE/CE dating system was first used in the 17th century and has been used since in scholarly publications read by people of all faiths and cultures in an effort to be inclusive. This system is also...
www.worldhistory.org
Lexicus
Deity
The Seven Years' War is most commonly referred to as the first world (or global) war.
@topic the "turn of the century" without context would refer to the most recent one. Given context it could refer to any of the centuries.
I mean, look...
I don't have an issue with CE personally but it seems disingenuous to claim that it has nothing to do with decentreing Christianity when this is the actual openly stated reason.
A terrorist attack that resulted in new wars in the Middle East that are still going on, a drastic rearrangement of how border crossings are done (once upon a time I could cross the border into the U.S. with just a casual piece of ID that they didn't even ask to see - they just wanted to know where I was from, where I was going, and when I planned to return, and now it takes a passport I don't have and will never have), bigotry on such a scale that thousands of Muslim asylum seekers (or people from mostly-Muslim countries/descent) crossed the border from the U.S. to Canada illegally after Trump did his "executive orders". Some of the asylum seekers ended up with permanent injuries from frostbite, and I'm not sure how many died.
That's not a "big whoop." It's significant. As is covid, given how procedures and attitudes and even jobs have changed or been eliminated. Half the stores in the local malls are empty. Restaurants I remember from pre-covid aren't there anymore. People want to shake hands and my first instinct is "Get away from me!" There are still people in the hospital with covid, and still people dying from it. That happens when you live in a region where the provincial government has a policy of being denialist and anti-vaxxer.
From my perspective, 2001 is no longer significant because of it being the first year of a new century and millennium, or even of the first science fiction movie I saw on TV. It's 9/11, covid (watching news coverage of people being literally welded into their apartment buildings so nobody would get out and spread the virus), and now this increasingly fascist government we have in my province now.
2001, for me, is the year that the world started going insane. 2006-2015 is known here as the Dark Decade, for good reason. Nothing like having a federal Environment Minister and Minister of Science who are YECs, and think that their jobs are to figure out ways to exploit the environment and keep people ignorant, rather than the other way around. Literally burning the contents of a library dedicated to environmental reports and data so it couldn't be used by protesters to prove the government was lying about how toxic some places were and how certain O&G companies really were culpable for causing disease in humans and animals... that's not something little.
Which is in part why I wouldn’t use it to refer back to 2000. Check back in 25 years.
I don’t think it’s changed all that much. A little crappier in some aspects, but can’t do much about it!
Must be nice. I nearly died in 2001. Several of my family members died in this century (6 cats, 1 dog, and both my parents; I guess that's more than just 'several'). Government apathy toward climate change (outright denying that it's happening) is having its effects. We've had wildfires going here for the past few weeks, and people consequently aren't upset that it's been snowing the past few days. There's drought going on and we need every drop of moisture.
Some people who are a bit OCD about dating methods would care. Given how one of my ways of doing research for my fanfic projects is dissecting the timelines of the source material, I tend to get annoyed with discrepancies of even one year.
I belong to a FB group called the Heinlein Society, and someone pointed out recently that Heinlein predicted smartphones and the frustrations of constantly being trackable by employers and acquaintances. It's in a short story he wrote in 1941.
It does tend to cut down on the arguments over when Jesus was born, since it makes no sense that he was likely born on the negative side of BC (according to what the astronomers have figured out from their research on the possible origin of the Star of Bethlehem story or what the historians have figured out from research on King Herod or the census required by Augustus).
On the "which century has seen more change", I think we're forgetting how many new machines the 1900s had.
In the 2000s, telecommunications is a big change. Both centuries have seen significant political changes in the first 25 years, though I would argue the demise of absolute monarchies in the 20th was the larger change on the whole.
In the 1900s? Faster rail and air transport - I don't buy the "people would have known what a balloon and airship was, so airplanes weren't a big deal" argument - airplanes changed the game. But once we get into the '20s and early '30s, we have vacuum cleaners, electronic freezers instead of iceboxes, electric irons, automobiles becoming increasingly popular. And the changes kept coming over the 1900s.
I go off the grid semi-frequently, and always argue for "let's not contact the person who's off work". Ford Motor Co did perfectly fine when Henry Ford took vacations to western Maryland and was off the grid for a week, there's no reason modern companies and teams can't do the same. If they have trouble trying to do so, it's a sign that they have a single point of failure that needs to be addressed, or else they'll have trouble if that person leaves.
In the 2000s, telecommunications is a big change. Both centuries have seen significant political changes in the first 25 years, though I would argue the demise of absolute monarchies in the 20th was the larger change on the whole.
In the 1900s? Faster rail and air transport - I don't buy the "people would have known what a balloon and airship was, so airplanes weren't a big deal" argument - airplanes changed the game. But once we get into the '20s and early '30s, we have vacuum cleaners, electronic freezers instead of iceboxes, electric irons, automobiles becoming increasingly popular. And the changes kept coming over the 1900s.
If you work for a company with a decent culture, that's still possible. Put the phone on silent mode, turn off the reception, or just let it run out of battery. So long as you still show up at work the next day, it's not a problem. Plus it's easier to block the number of annoying acquaintances these days.
I go off the grid semi-frequently, and always argue for "let's not contact the person who's off work". Ford Motor Co did perfectly fine when Henry Ford took vacations to western Maryland and was off the grid for a week, there's no reason modern companies and teams can't do the same. If they have trouble trying to do so, it's a sign that they have a single point of failure that needs to be addressed, or else they'll have trouble if that person leaves.
