Why does a new SimpleDateFormat object contain calendar with the wrong year?

Question

I came upon a strange behavior that has left me curious and without a satisfactory explanation as yet.

For simplicity, I\'ve reduced the symptoms I\'ve noticed to th

Answer 1

Looking through SimpleDateFormat it seems like it's something to do with serialization:

/* Initialize the fields we use to disambiguate ambiguous years. Separate
 * so we can call it from readObject().
 */
private void initializeDefaultCentury() {
    calendar.setTime( new Date() );
    calendar.add( Calendar.YEAR, -80 );
    parseAmbiguousDatesAsAfter(calendar.getTime());
}