Consensus New Year
Consensus New Year
[A graph labeled “Percentage of the world's population living in 2019” with Y-axis markers at 0%, 50%, and 100%, and X-axis markers at 10:00 AM EST Dec 31st, 1:30 PM EST, 7:00 PM EST, Midnight EST, 3:00 AM EST Jan 1st, and 7:00 AM EST.] [The line graph shows the percentage increasing from 0 to 100% in several steps, with 50% reached at 1:30 PM EST.]
[Caption below the panel:] Consensus New Year: as of 1:30PM Eastern Time (6:30PM UTC) a majority of the world's population will be living in 2019.
Randall has mislabeled the leftmost point of the graph: the Earth's earliest time zone ( UTC+14:00 ) should have the midnight at 5:00 AM EST rather than 10:00 AM EST. The number of one-hour increments on the x-axis does not match Randall's label.

In this New Year comic , Randall is proposing a compromise for when to celebrate, or recognize, New Year's Day .  These celebrations traditionally take place at the stroke of midnight between Dec. 31st and Jan. 1st, at the local time of the event's location.  With "Consensus New Year", these celebrations would happen at the same time, world over, and would be at exactly 1:30 pm EST (6:30 pm UTC ).  At this time, about half the world's population would be in 2018 local time and the other half would be in 2019.  This is due to the various time zones throughout the world, and the graph is based on the proportion of the population in these zones.
This is based on the assumption that the entire world uses the same calendar system.  Randall's graph shows the year starting on the same day for the entire world.  While the Gregorian calendar is used as the civil calendar in most countries of the world, the Eastern Orthodox churches uses the Julian calendar, on which the year will begin 13 days later, and the year (as of December 2018-January 2019) is 1440 on the Muslim calendar and 5779 on the Hebrew calendar. Other countries have the same New Year as the Gregorian calendar but count years differently; for example, 2019 is the year 108 in Taiwan and 2562 in Thailand.
The Wiktionary entry for " consensus " includes multiple definitions, including these two meanings:
In an attributive grammar structure, a noun is placed before another noun to assign an attribute to it.  When "consensus" is used this way, it's a statistical term which means the average projected value of the modified noun.
Randall properly uses this first definition for both the title of the comic and the graph itself, where the graph represents the average projected value of the percentage of the world population reaching the new year at any given time.
Randall may be purposefully misusing the second definition of the word "consensus" to reflect the common misuse of the term consensus for the practice of majority vote .
In scenarios involving group decision-making, consensus means that all or almost all members of the group will accept the decision.  Depending on how it is done, this generally results in a slower decision-making process due to discussion, but decisions that many more people are happy with.  Consensus can scale to large groups of people using approaches such as the spokescouncil model to speed dialogue. By this definition, Consensus New Year happens at one of the last four time zones as the last to "agree" enter 2019, so (nearly full consensus definition) 4:00 am, 5:00 am, 6:00 am, or (full consensus definition) 7:00 am EST on January 1, 2019.
Consensus lies in contrast to majority vote, where a decision passes when over 50% of the people desire it.  Majority vote is used in most current large democracies and is what most people are familiar with.  It is quick to describe and implement, but can result in polarized political parties and a stark lack of minority rights, unless enough people develop concern for the issues that they are tempered with constitutions and logrolling .
The leftmost horizontal axis label (10am EST Dec 31st) was an error. The point marked as 0% should be 5am EST (see table below).
Additionally, some of the lines are shown with a slope, which is inaccurate. Since sun time is not used anywhere, a correct graph line would only consist of horizontal and vertical lines.
[A graph labeled “Percentage of the world's population living in 2019” with Y-axis markers at 0%, 50%, and 100%, and X-axis markers at 10:00 AM EST Dec 31st, 1:30 PM EST, 7:00 PM EST, Midnight EST, 3:00 AM EST Jan 1st, and 7:00 AM EST.] [The line graph shows the percentage increasing from 0 to 100% in several steps, with 50% reached at 1:30 PM EST.]
[Caption below the panel:] Consensus New Year: as of 1:30PM Eastern Time (6:30PM UTC) a majority of the world's population will be living in 2019.
Randall has mislabeled the leftmost point of the graph: the Earth's earliest time zone ( UTC+14:00 ) should have the midnight at 5:00 AM EST rather than 10:00 AM EST. The number of one-hour increments on the x-axis does not match Randall's label.
