That’s not how physics works, but I appreciate the thought.

Because we can make it better, even if it’s just a tiny amount. To me, that’s enough. It’s the same with daylight savings time, the imperial system (in the few places that still use it), ISO 8601 date format, and so on. Sure, every individual patch doesn’t do a whole lot, and even together the effect may not be world-altering, but I simply refuse to believe in a future where we keep these small bugs around just because we were stupid once and then were too lazy to fix them.

It also wouldn’t be starting the count at 0. But to have a coherent system with both positive and negative numbers, there needs to be a 0. Plus, you can still call the year 0 the first year. When somebody is 0 years old, they’re in their first year of their life as well.

The Russia comparison was more for feasibility, not for importance.

That’s… not the only option. We could also shift down everything below 1. Sure, that would shift some historical dates, but would not really affect any part of modern life. And we already have situations where we need to account for different calendar systems (e.g. the October Revolution actually happened in November, according to our current calendar), so we know the world doesn’t end. And when Russia switched to the Gregorian calendar, which was more complicated than adding a 0 somewhere, the world didtend either.

Just adding a year 0 would be enough. Other than that, the human era.

How 'bout we don’t give a fuck and use a sensible system instead?

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.

Not according to those who think that the new century only began in 2001 because the Christian calendar has no year 0 or smth.