Here's a question that's purely hypothetical, and is so unlikely to ever need answering that is basically isn't worth asking, but I'm intrigued none-the-less.
Let's say there is <something> that requires a certain length of time, whether it is a 3 day waiting period to buy a gun (totally made up law, I have no idea about Samoan laws), or some prize given to any Samoan who turns 100 years old. Would it go by number of actual days, i.e. how many 24 hour periods have passed, or would it go by date?
Yeah, two terrible examples, and like I said, I doubt the answer would ever have any practical use. And for that reason, perhaps there is no definitive answer. Is there?
IANAL but I would have thought this is really no big deal.
If the stipulation is in days (eg 3 days cooling off) then 3 days is 3 days - the date doesn't matter.
If the stipulation is months or years, then the missing day is simply ignored.
I mean, we have a February 29 every 4 years. We already have "months" being an indeterminate number of days (28, 29, 30, 31). So December will have 30 days instead of 31. Big deal. Lots of countries have a time change twice a year, and it doesn't cause any major issues.
For the sake of computer "elapsed time" (interest calculations and so on) it's equally a non-event. The easiest way to handle interest for example is just to treat the missing day as if it had occurred. So it was a really short day, a holiday, which you slept through. Folks will still get paid for the "whole month" of December and so on.
I'm not sure what they'll do, but as long as it's trivially simple I suspect people will adapt very easily.
The worst that'll happen is that everyone will miss out on a whole Wednesday worth of TV. Bummer!
Folks will still get paid for the "whole month" of December and so on.
Well, one example of how it could be problematic, is if someone is paid hourly (say a freelancer with a non-expiring fulltime-equivilent contract to a company). They would lose out on a day's pay, while their rent/other bills would still charge for one month, not for one month pro-rated down by one day.
As you said, different months have different lengths anyway, so it's not like an end-of-the-world problem, but for someone in that situation, they will none-the-less be losing money as a result of the change.
And as to your judgements on days vs months, it's fine to say "it doesn't have to be a problem if we do it like this", but when it comes to any sort of law or contract, that would rely on both parties agreeing, and it's not impossible that they would take opposite views to both try and improve the situation for themselves.
On a side note, if I were in Samoa, I would have great fun buying a 2011 calendar from as many shops as I could, then go round on December 29th complaining that it was factually incorrect and wanting a refund. Well, I say "I would...", in actual fact I wouldn't be quite that bored. But I like the idea of doing that.
>> As you said, different months have different lengths anyway, so it's not like an end-of-the-world problem, but for someone in that situation, they will none-the-less be losing money as a result of the change.
No, they're not really losing money, it's more like they're losing the opportunity to make money on that missing day. So a freelancer can, for example work in an extra day that week if they choose.
Public Holidays have the same effect every year, especially in countries where the actual day of the holiday follows the date, and thus in some years falls on a weekend.
Actually they've chosen to shorten a month which has 31 days to 30 days, which is no different than say April, June, September or November. So, by your measure they're being shorted for at least 5 months of every year anyway.
Plus, they've done it between Christmas and New Years, which in the Southern Hemisphere is the middle of the summer holidays. So pretty much no-one is working anyway.
The opposite way of looking at the same data is that they get a "free day" in every 31-day-month. And one of these "free days" is being discarded.
In other words, only us programmer types would try and nit-pick the thing apart. People on the ground haven't "lost" anything really.
My point about the contracts is that nothing is affected. Contracts that say "days" mean days, contracts that say months mean "months". This is built into contracts already because months aren't the same length. a 30 day December is no different to a 30 day April.
Care to elaborate? I'm aware there are conventions, but can't see how they help when you're compounding daily and a day disappears.
Say Bank A lends $10M to Bank B on Monday at 0.1% per day. On Tuesday B pays $1k to A. The following day is a Thursday. How much B owes A? $1k or $2k? $1k sounds reasonable but unless you modify your date library you'll probably get $2k.
In theory, you should still have to wait the full period. But in practice, it depends on whether the software actually counts elapsed time like a stopwatch (unlikely) or just calculates a future date for release of the gun. As long as the system clock got updated, it would probably OK your gun a day early.
Let's say there is <something> that requires a certain length of time, whether it is a 3 day waiting period to buy a gun (totally made up law, I have no idea about Samoan laws), or some prize given to any Samoan who turns 100 years old. Would it go by number of actual days, i.e. how many 24 hour periods have passed, or would it go by date?
Yeah, two terrible examples, and like I said, I doubt the answer would ever have any practical use. And for that reason, perhaps there is no definitive answer. Is there?