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perryizgr8

YK22 expands to Year 1022. Why not use the correct acronym Y2K22?

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And YKK expands to your fly being undone.

If anyone else is curious, YKK is a Japanese company that makes roughly half the world’s zippers:

https://slate.com/business/2012/04/ykk-zippers-why-so-many-d...

And 100% of the world’s good zippers

Illegal monopolies and anti-competitive behavior[0] have that effect. Such arrangements may produce the best widget available but probably not the best widget possible. More to the point, they definitely don't produce the best possible widget for the best price.

That said, I wish Levi's still used YKK or something better than whatever no-name garbage zipper they use now in the cut I've worn for years.

[0]https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL1926941520070919

I've had more than one YKK zipper fail on very expensive technical jackets. Not sure if I was just unlucky, or your statement is wrong.

That they make 100% of the worlds good zippers doesn't imply that 100% of the zippers they make are good.

There is no easy way to know whether a zipper with YKK stamped on it is genuine, or a Chinese knock-off.

https://www.ykkfastening.com/brand/counterfeit.html

Opti also make some pretty good zippers. There are certainly very few good manufacturers in this space though.

If I had not known we were talking about a 2022 bug, I'd have not guessed that Y2K22 meant 2022. I'd have guessed it was using the same convention widely used in electronics for writing component values, which would give 2220.

That convention is instead of writing something like 2.2 k you write 2k2, using the scaling suffix as the decimal separator.

I don't know how this convention came about put would guess it is some combination of it being more compact which might help with legible labeling on a schematic diagram or PCB, and of it stopping bickering over whether the decimal separator should be '.' or ',' on projects with an international team.

Ah, I remember that convention from my youthful electronics-hobby days!

I always assumed that the idea was to reduce the risk of misreading due to overlooking the decimal point (or interpreting a random speck of dirt/ink/whatever as a spurious decimal point), particularly in potentially-untidy hand-drawn schematics.

But maybe I'm inventing that explanation out of nothing at all... I don't have any supporting evidence, it just seemed plausible to me.

Or why not just use Y2022 if it saves literally not a single character?

I guess the obvious answer is that everyone knows "Y2K" so "Y2K22" communicates more clearly what it is about.

It's not a scientific term. We know what was meant and you knew what the "correct" version is. It's unambiguous and understandable, it's fine.

Idk I just saw it used elsewhere and mindless typed it

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