Schwern

@Obie2.0 This is a guy who blew more money than the annual GDP of half the countries on the planet on Twitter as a vanity project and then trashed it. It's hard to fathom the profit motivations of someone who is worth $200 billion. At some point it's a compulsion to make even more money. At his level of wealth and security, regulations and governments aren't protections they're restrictions. It's a long game to tear them all down.

@barbecue 1) Create a simplistic, false narrative that benefits you and that people are keyed to be sympathetic to: look at this ridiculous govt regulation needlessly restricting my innovative and awesome rockets! 2) Spread it via, oh I don't know, a globe spanning social media network you happen to own. 3) Those influenced people fight on your side against otherwise sensible and beneficial regulations... FOR FREE! 4) Profit!

@Obie2.0 My original contention was with MAGolding's blithe comment that "But the allies didn't need to invade Japan. That was something they desired to do." As if the Allies were just being mean to Japan or playing with their toys. They were trying to save as many people as they could from a brutal war as quickly as possible. I don't know if the bomb was the best or only way to do that, but I appreciate the urgency to end the war at the time.

@Obie2.0 "occupation by a foreign power, particularly one like Imperial Japan, is very negative..." It's estimated 20 million people died in China and 100 million refugees. The point is one focuses on the bomb and ignores the consequences of the war continuing. I bring up the unwillingness of Japan to take surrender seriously because those truce negotiations would have prolonged the war. Every day thousands and thousands of people, civilians and soldiers, died under Japanese occupation, Allied bombardment, and fighting in China and SE Asia. That cannot be ignored.

@Obie2.0 Given Japan's lackluster attempts to negotiate, their leadership's lack of concern for their own citizens, and 50/50 split on surrender even after the atomic bomb and invasion of Manchuria... how do you think such a truce could have happened?

@M.A.Golding What was the alternative? Blockade and let the war drag on for another year while Japan starves, vicious fighting continues in China, and Korea and SE Asia continue to be ravaged by Japanese occupation?

"Did estimates indicate that more people would have died in a longer conventional war, than those who were killed in the two atomic bombings...?" I think this can be answered objectively by providing the various contemporary estimates. However, that's a better question for History.SE and is probably already answered many times there.

"this claim suffers from the problems that the atomic bombings killed mainly civilians, whereas in conventional warfare those who would have died would be mainly soldiers" On the contrary, continued conventional bombardment from air and sea was and would continue to kill civilians. Blockade brought a food shortage and the winter of 1945 would have brought starvation. To fight a conventional invasion Japan planned to use civilians in the "Glorious Death of 100 Million"

Yes, we just need to use your calendar. Good day!

And that's all the time I have to spend on this. Sorry we never got to your actual question, but we had to work out this whole thing about quietly changing what years mean first.

Using your own corrections without making that clear will confuse people.

And leads to arguing about that instead of your actual question.

It's just confusing.

That is BCLee.

In order to have a discussion about history, we need to agree what terms mean. If 45 BC means something different to you and I, we can't have a meaningful discussion. This is why I'm suggesting you use BCLee when referring to years according to your calculations.

And we can talk about historical dates without having to first agree on your other work.

And the Julian calendar began on Jan 1, 45 BC.

Ok, so the eclipse is May 18, 603 BC

Well, you're going to confuse people if you mix BC with BCLee and not get your question answered.

It's just confusing. Calendars are hard enough.

For the purposes of a History.SE question.

Which is not relevant to converting Astronomical Years to Gregorian.

Look, I can't spend any more time on this. If you're going to present dates using your own calendar, make it clear that's what you're doing. Don't say "BC" say "BCLee" or something. I can't make sense of what you're saying because of it.

You built a tower of assumptions.

And if that's wrong, everything is wrong.

And build up from there.

The eclipse you assume happened in 685 BC

Let's put an * after everything that is according to your calculations.

Is this by your calculations?

Julius Casear added 88 days to 46 BC.

I read your post. It's a tower of assumptions, any one could be wrong. I'm sorry, I'm not going to try and untangle all of them. But your 44 BC assertion seems to be based on simply a hunch: "Then I began to suspect the 90 days were added in 45 BC not 46 BC, because Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC, and I figured the events were related."

Did you assume Rome was founded during an eclipse, go hunting for an eclipse over Rome near 753 BC, and then redefined the founding of Rome to be that year?

I thought that's what you were trying to prove.

If you're going to change what 1 AUC means, you're going to have to say that up front.

Look, it seems you've made up your own calendar.

@leepappas I don't understand what this means.

You're off by quite a bit.

1470868 is -0685-01-07 or Jan 7th, 686 BC

April 1st, 1 AUC (753 BC) is 1446481

Cool. This is just about your "PROOF THERE WAS A ZERO BC"

Did you re-run your math with the correct year?

Look, you're interested in having your math checked and open to the possibility of being corrected, great, I'm here for it. If you're not, I'll go.

I'm really not sure what that has to do with getting the start of the Julian calendar wrong.

If you mean 1704987 that is Jan 1, 45 BC. Try it. core2.gsfc.nasa.gov/time/julian.html

The Julian calendar begin in 45 BC. You have a factual error.

BTW I write calendaring software.

Sure am.

You have a simple factual mistake which produced your off-by-one error.

And, again, none of this is relevant to converting a modern Astronomical Year to a Gregorian Year.