Ah, letter paper. I usually cannot see the printer message clearly through the Red Mist, but that feels right.
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I heard from someone that when Canada went metric in the 1970s, a company wrote to the metrication committee and asked them to trancher la question: set the rules for official date format as either dd-mm-yy or mm-dd-yy. English Canada tended to use the latter and French Canada the former.
It took weeks for a reply. Eventually it arrived: yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss. Brilliant!
It didn’t favour either group and was eminently logical. If someone ever tells you that they think that format is a bad idea, just take two points in time in that format, write them out one on top of the other and subtract one from the other to figure out the length of time between the two…
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To make a point, between the years 2000 and 2012, I used to write out dates in the standard nn-nn-nn and ask: is this date such and such a year, month, and day, or is it… Writing yyyy-mm-dd makes it very clear that the first number is the year, then the next must be the month, then the day. You’d get thumbs up from me.
In German, ‘halb acht’ (half eight) means seven thirty. In old French, which is often spoken where I live, people say “un quart de deux” - literally a quarter from two - which means a quarter to two. Really, if you didn’t know, you might think it means a quarter past two.
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I use yyyy-mm-dd but won’t that break some sort algorithms in about 7984 years?
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Fine!.. Just use the yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy-mm-dd format (with a 256-bit year).
Of course, drop the leading zeroes.
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That will be the least of our worries 
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The Long Now Foundation has been ahead of the curve on this, at least by one digit.
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I’m pretty bad at being American… I default to the ISO for most things (or spelled out month 11 Oct 2016), since I can never remember how I am supposed to do the mur’can date. I’m sure that folks who have to process forms that I fill out hate me because if they don’t specify the format, I start with the day.
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Another thing that the US ignores: zero/zed/0
If this was devised in the US it would have started with A1
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Some years ago, when I was learning how to make databases, with dates, the ISO standard struck me like a revelation. Why doesn’t everyone do it this way?!!? It’s so logical: year, month, day, hour, minute, second. But, we can’t even get our country to move to celcius or metric.
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The logical Germans and Russians use “bis”/“byez” (before) as in “quarter before eight”. The problem with all such systems is human laziness which causes them to drop the essential connectives. I suspect that ultimately the world will move to hours - minutes but with many hiccups on the way. But that’s mostly as analogue clocks die out.
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but this is part of the elegance of the paper format. want to know the weigth? As A0 is exactly one square meter one simply uses the A index for the calculation: ten A4 sheets of 80g/m2 paper weight 1080/24 = 1080/16 = 50g, one A6 card of 160g/m2 cardboard 160/26 = 160/64 = 2.5g
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