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South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting

independent.co.uk

21–30 of 138 posts

Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting

#21
post #8

I actually wished a change in reverse direction, the world adopting the Korean standard of age accounting for full existence, not just postpartum existence. The later feels quite arbitrary, at least for me.

Leaving aside religious and philosophical aspects, I think Most people would struggle to identify exact date and time they were conceived.

Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting

#22
post #16
post #8

I actually wished a change in reverse direction, the world adopting the Korean standard of age accounting for full existence, not just postpartum existence. The later feels quite arbitrary, at least for me.

The Korean approach is still wrong, arguably. If you want to include the totality of the life of the baby, the next normal stopping point would be conception. That would make the child ~9 months old, not 1 year.

In practice, you normally don't know the exact date of conception, you can only roughly estimate, but any estimate is likely to be a few days out. There are exceptions – e.g. IVF, or the parents know they only did it once and remember the exact date they did it on (but their memories may be fallible, etc). Birth is better because (in developed countries where babies are normally born in hospital) the bureaucracy almost always knows the exact date every person was born – in many cases even the time of day, not that anyone really cares about that.

Plus, any proposal like that is inevitably going to get mixed up with the politics of abortion, which is another reason why it won't happen.

Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting

#24
post #10
post #8

I actually wished a change in reverse direction, the world adopting the Korean standard of age accounting for full existence, not just postpartum existence. The later feels quite arbitrary, at least for me.

You think the moment of birth is more arbitrary than trying to figure out when a clump of cells/a fetus is viable?

Yes. I have a sister 15 years younger. My parents still keep her ultrasound plates around. Her ID states she is from this millennium. But yet the timestamps in the plates show she was already here with us in the end of the past millennium. Every time I see them, it gives me an uneasy feeling the way we're used to count our time is just wrong.

Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting

#25
post #16
post #8

I actually wished a change in reverse direction, the world adopting the Korean standard of age accounting for full existence, not just postpartum existence. The later feels quite arbitrary, at least for me.

The Korean approach is still wrong, arguably. If you want to include the totality of the life of the baby, the next normal stopping point would be conception. That would make the child ~9 months old, not 1 year.

They could have fixed just that.

Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting

#26
post #9

Ah standards. Taking all the fun out of international travel confusion. Now if we could only get the US onto the metric system and abolish daylight saving time.

The US heavily uses metric, just like other nations also use English while having a different primary language. The US leads the world in technological and scientific output and has for over a century, it very obviously and very commonly uses the metric system.

Communication is more important than measurement. Nearly everybody else needs to abandon their languages and adopt English, Spanish or Mandarin - because standards. Half the people of Europe share no common language and can't communicate properly with one another, if only we could talk some sense into them and get them onto a standard.

Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting

#27
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just shows you how reality-denying the 1 indexers can be, going as far as calling a newborn 1 even though (if normal term) it was conceived roughly 0.75 years ago.

Don't consider it an age then, think of it as "the count of calendar years within which a person has existed." A newborn has only seen 1 year, 2023. An infant born any time in 2022 has lived across 2 years. This simplifies things when you only need, or only have, someone's year of birth.

Why restrict to years? I have existed in two calendar millennia.

Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting

#28
post #9

Ah standards. Taking all the fun out of international travel confusion. Now if we could only get the US onto the metric system and abolish daylight saving time.

And, for that matter, stop counting years and centuries from one. The 19th century was from 1900 to 1999. The 20th started at the year 2000.

The current century being the 21st will make that very confusing.

The 2000/2001 start of the 21st century is reasonable debate. Mathematically, 2001 makes sense. In terms of being excited during the 1999→2000 transition with all the digits incrementing, it makes more sense socially to have celebrated the new millennium and century then.

Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting

#29
post #9

Ah standards. Taking all the fun out of international travel confusion. Now if we could only get the US onto the metric system and abolish daylight saving time.

And, for that matter, stop counting years and centuries from one. The 19th century was from 1900 to 1999. The 20th started at the year 2000.

So, the first century in the Current Era would be 99 years? There's no year 0. A century is any quantity of 100, go crazier: 1946 to 2045!!!

Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting

#30
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

even weirder than that, as far as I can tell, as the whole year cohort ages together on the same day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asian_age_reckoning

It's not that weird - I'm sure most folks spend their school-years referring to other kids as "the same year (grade) as me" or "the year (grade) above/below me". Even to this day, I intuitively group friends based on the academic year group they were in.

> Even to this day, I intuitively group friends based on the academic year group they were in

How far out of school are you?

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