Since a lot of people depend on Saudi observations, I imagine this will be influential. People grumble about Saudi Arabia, but they set the trends. They're kind of like California that way.
I don't mean to harsh on you but I feel you have it completely backwards. The computers should do the heavy lifting to adapt to how people want to live, not the other way around. If people want flexible calendars that optimize for strange things let the computers do the heavy lifting for them.
I have been quite sorry when countries have attacked their languages or even alphabets in a misguided way to support computers (consider the letters ll and ch in Spain which were "reformed" just in time for the "improvement" to become irrelevant) when the responsibility lies with the computer.
This is not only a computer issue: cities and suburbs were restructured for automobiles, and even the law changed (the invention of "jaywalking" at the behest of car manufacturers) rather than forcing the machines to adapt to the needs of humans.
Technodeterminism is simply a weakness of will.
Not everything we do is without question; we do some pretty dumb stuff. Why not improve our systems where it makes sense to?
The cry of "progress!" has resulted in plenty of destruction as well as benefit, not to mention mountains of premature optimization (think of those elevated freeways into cities that created dead zones and had to be dismantled only decades later, or for that matter the alphabet changes I mentioned).
We used to vary the length of the hour; now we have a second that is fixed and we vary the length of the human day in order to match the rotation of the earth. I happen to think that's a good optimization but I have friends who argue vociferously that those leap seconds are a bad idea. Who's right (hint: on all topics I am).
And there are no absolutes: some languages let their spelling fluctuate (e.g. English), some fix it somewhat rigidly (e.g. French) and some change it systolicly to re-align with perceived practice (e.g. German) -- who is right? I speak all three daily and frankly I consider the German practice the worst of the three. But enough people prefer it so why not?
Sure there's tons of stupid practice (e.g anti-vaxxers). But at the end of the day technology (τέχνη) is an art in service of humans, not the other way around. And to tie this back to HN: if a business doesn't think that way it will not survive.
But it's hardly technodeterminism to say that it's a bloodydamn hard problem to solve, and may not even be solvable (which is why I contend with the 'weakness of will' part). That's sort of my point: if they can't consistently solve the calendar by hand, I can't imagine getting a computer to do it. It would have to be something wildly complex, like a social networking system that bases your calendar on your own web of trust. Someday that may be reasonable someday, but we're probably only barely hitting the point where we can get Lady of Mazes-style masks of the world metadata [0].
So you have deeply complex richness in language and culture, but computers took decades to be smart enough to capture it in it's plodding bin-packing way. Either these cultures could miss out on years of work integrating in with the enormous advantages and progress computers provide, or they can wait and fall behind. I'd choose to be an optimist and hope that we can now bend to the complex needs of these cultures now instead of first resorting to poor approximations. Just as we can now do better than all-caps ASCII, we can try harder to meet the demands of these complex calendar systems. Woe be unto the programmer who has to code those horrific systems, but ... well, that's the job :)
Re automobiles, I think there's a long, complex history at play there. A town I used to live in would have the residents complain often of the train that would cut through at the most inconvenient times of the day, right across a crowded main street. They often complained of the audacity of the train company's scheduling, forgetting that the train predated the town. And, in fact, the town was there because of the train. But it's a mess, and what can you do. The train was there first, but the town's noisier. Hilariously the train company also doesn't care, I think, and frankly you always give right of way to the bigger vehicle (a lesson I learned from working in plants rather than social justice).
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Lady-Mazes-Karl-Schroeder/dp/07653507... I'm a huge fan of this book. While I think it's probably not great literature, it has some well articulated ideas about how technology and society interact. A central conceit of the story is the protagonist lives in an area managed by tech locks. These restrict technology to match the society (it is explained somewhat late in the story, and how it came to exist is pretty interesting). You're not restricted from moving between worlds, so to speak, but it puts at the forefront how much even the subtle demands of technology can shape a society (from music-based tribes to singularity-tech ringworlds).
Human cultures tend to evolve such unnecessary complications all the time, and technology has historically been a driver to re-evaluate past choices and simplify where appropriate. For example, the printing press caused many states to revisit their alphabets, and get rid of the accumulated cruft that no longer represented meaningfully distinct phonemes.
https://books.google.com/books/about/Calendrical_Calculation...
Calendrical Calculations is a fascinating intro the different calendar systems, along with computational methods of converting between systems.
The bible says the new moon must be observed, but the formula for the calendar was calculated in 389CE and that requirement was not observed. I was taught they switched to the calculated calendar right then, but wikipedia says newer sources show the switch was a gradual process that lasted until the 9th century CE.
If you're referring to the "extra 11 days", it doesn't have anything to do with losing holidays -- the solar calendar is simply 11 days longer than the lunar one. So in other words, it's a silly complaint.
Though I suppose if you earned a yearly salary on the lunar calendar and your employer gave you the same salary on the solar calendar, you'd be taking a 3% pay cut.
> A slippery slope, the clergy warn, to forgetting the fasting month of Ramadan altogether; the authorities are rewinding the clock to the jahiliyyah, or pre-Islamic age of ignorance.
This seems to indicate that larger issue is the fact that the current calendar is inextricably tied to Islam, whereas the new calendar is secular at best, or the tool of a different religion at worst.
I honestly would prefer something based on a shared solar event. The Crab Nebula and supernova in 1088 ACE would be a good neutral place, as would other events, like Halley's Comet.
It would be secular, and sold to the world as such. But it would put the focus on solar events, in which any number of peoples can use as an omen for their local system of religion and symbolism. Can't win everything here, but neutrality is certainly a laudable goal.
(Edit: wow, quite a bit of -1's, and no real good reason why. I was hoping for a good neutral dialogue, rather than bemoaning current date systems. And also, it may have been Pope Gregory. It still is bound to the Catholic church.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar (edit: typo caused me to credit the wrong Pope.)
As opposed to "Holidays" meaning days like Easter/Christmas/New Years/etc.