In reply to:
Unfortunately, there was not a year 1 either. Or 2, or....
Dionysus Exiguus (Dennis the Short) literally invented the year 1, around the year 500!
The notion, therefore, that there 'was no year zero' yet there was a year one, is inconsistent.
Your rant reminded me of a very amusing two page as for Saudi Air I saw once - a photo of a 747 and the words, "We've been flying since 1345" While I may have the exact year wrong, I was impressed that the ad made no mention of the fact that date given was A.H. rather A.D. - a nice slap in the face for infidel Western pig-dogs and their cultural imperialism. 
[counterrant]
On a more serious note, I found tsuwm's "decade" argument more compelling than yours. Any epochal dating system is arbitrary. A.H. is a good example of this. There was no year zero in the A.H. system either, but there was a year one. Taking as inevitable the artifice and arbitrary retrogression implicit in the creation of a starting point for a dating system, said system must still have a "year one." The alternative strikes me as similar to mandating the removal of the last carriage from all trains - if there is no year one, then there can be no year two, etc. I am quite happy to accept vox populi, vox dei, although you are as selective in accepting that as any of us. All of us here have points on which we say "the people have spoken", and other points on which we say "the people are wrong". I don't make a fuss about the millennium, except in jest. I do believe that there was a starting point to the dating system currently in use. It matters not when that start was, it matters only that there was a start. Without an accepted starting point, however arbitrary, the system is worthless. By Gould's argument, I could assert that, like Humpty Dumpty, the millennium means exactly what I want it to mean, nothing more, nothing less. You and he(Gould, that is, not Humpty) have accepted the dating system in use, therefore when you say that it is the year 2000, you are acknowledging that almost 2000 full years have passsed since the point chosen as the start of the epoch.[/counterrant]
