Eh, if you're going to break with previous calendars, you can do much better.
1. Round off the year to 360 days.
2. This lets us get an even 12 months of 30 days.
3. Drop the week from 7 days to 6, for a 4-day workweek and 5 weeks per month.
It wouldn't take long before this calendar was inconsistent. The Earth rotates about 365 times before it returns to its previous spot in its orbit around the sun. If you adopted a 360 day calendar (assuming you by "day" in this calendar system you mean "a 24-hour period"), then after just a decade of this calendar, summer would happen 50 days earlier than it does today.
Locking the calendar to the seasons is really valuable if you work on a farm or do other seasonal work. However, anyone who doesn't need to track the seasons may prefer the 6/5/30/12 simplified model.
There would be some adjustment, like "winter" holidays occurring in the summer. Although anyone who lives in different climates or moves between the northern and southern hemispheres will already experience something similar.
A good question may be how often would you need to calculate or look up something that the other calendar would make obvious. The better calendar (for you) is the one that reduces those occurrences.
How is seasonal data important for modern farming operations? Farms want even more precise weather data which they can augment to their own calendars. Most people care far more about weekly weather variations and will not experience difficulty in determining when summer is coming.
Also, given the variation that people experience across geography, my per-month weather is quite different from yours. A global synchrony is not fit for farming operations. How much of the world even experiences a beautiful alignment of the seasons to their calendar?
Further, the kinds of adjustments people are proposing is not going to knock anyone off their ability to schedule around entire seasons. People are proposing tiny roundoffs to eliminate calendar idiosyncrasies (excluding the offhand 360 suggestion, which while "small" is going to lead to more idiosyncrasy).
I think you're understating these adjustments. Christmas happening in the summer? School "summer break" happening during winter? These are massive changes
I don't think either of those adjustment would occur.
I know my highschool didn't have AC, so the summer break needed to happen in the summer. I expect the school year would continue to follow the seasons (unless, maybe, we had really cheap AC?). It would be strange to have the school year start in different months, but you'd get used to it. I know I already need to look up when the school year starts; it shifts a little already due to holidays and the days of the week.
Personally, I grew up with cold winters and liked Christmas as a snowy winter holiday. But when I moved and had warmer winters and less defined seasons, Christmas came and it didn't really feel like winter. A summer Christmas wouldn't be noticeably different here.
I like the idea of a major winter holiday for anyone struggling through a cold winter. For many people, that's currently Christmas, and I suspect the US and similar climates would benefit from keeping it seasonal.
But what's the actual value proposition of having a simple regular calendar if all of the important dates that people care about move around on it all the time? Sure, maybe you always know what date it is, but now you don't know what's happening on that date. The end result is the same level of complexity, it's just that now the date numbers are useless.
> all of the important dates that people care about move around
What dates do you care about?
I know my calendar is full of one-off events, and the recurring events follow the calendar, not the seasons. For these, a 6 day week/30 day month would be easier. That weekly Monday meeting? Always on the 1st, 7th, 13th, 19th, or 25th. The next federal holiday? We can make those always fall on a Monday if we wanted.
I can see that the start/end of the school year is important, but that already moves around enough that you need to look it up. If you are looking for best dates to take a beach vacation, yes, you'd need to look at the seasons.
Actually <pedant> it rotates 366 times, because each noon-to-noon it rotates 361 degrees. Just returning one face to the sun adds about one degree because of the earth's motion around the sun, and so adds exactly one rotation each year (each complete revolution around the sun) </pedant>
<edited degrees>
Close, but I think you confused the 360 degrees of a circle with the ~365 days in a year. The extra nearly-one degree of rotation in a solar day brings us to a hair under 361 degrees ;)
I would've taken that bonus week to be a given; it's rather odd to me that other commenters seemingly ain't doing so and are instead discussing this as if the year actually would get disconnected from Earth's rotation.
Basically make "Mid-summer" or "New Years" days that are outside of months (we could have something similar if Feb 29 wasn't part of Feb or March) - Tolkien's version had the extra days also not be part of the week, so you'd have Monday - Yule - Tuesday for example so that a given day of the month would be the same weekday each year.
Downside - if your birthday fell on a weekday, it would always fall on a weekday, forever.
Because if you don't, the seasons and the months will drift out of sync with each other. And you don't even get the benefits of a lunar calendar as a tradeoff, because your weeks are shorter than 1/4 of a lunar month, and your months are two days longer than a lunar month.
> Because if you don't, the seasons and the months will drift out of sync with each other.
And?
> And you don't even get the benefits of a lunar calendar as a tradeoff
What are the benefits of a lunar calendar? And it's not like our 7-day week actually stays in sync with the moon, it's just approximately the same length.
The length of a year is determined by the earth's orbit around the sun. Sure, you can make a calendar that isn't actually a year long, and then correct the errors that accumulate every once in a while, either by inserting a few months every few hundred years, or by adding a leap day every 4 years, but why would you intentionally make a calendar that isn't a year long? Leap days are unavoidable, but seasons drifting out-of-sync are not.
1. Round off the year to 360 days. 2. This lets us get an even 12 months of 30 days. 3. Drop the week from 7 days to 6, for a 4-day workweek and 5 weeks per month.