Saw this on twitter along with a snarky remark about raising the retirement age. Cant find the tweet anymore and the article doesnt say, but is retirement age affected by this reform ?
South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting
91–100 of 138 posts
Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting
#92Ah 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.
Alternative take: the US customary units have stuck around because SI has failed to present itself as better enough to switch. Grant that all base units are arbitrary[1], many of the customary units make easier logical sense in day-to-day life, or are designed to be divisible in easier units than SI units are designed to be. Do you want ⅓ of a foot? Well, that's 4 inches (12 inches in a foot, divide by 3, you get 4).…
> What's a more convenient scale for human living conditions? 0–100 °F or -20–40 °C? I am aware people live in even colder and hotter environments, but the majority of people in the world don't need to worry about values outside of this range. I also think "0 is very cold" and "100 is very hot" just makes more sense than "-20 is very cold" and "40 is very hot".
The idea that 0-100F is somehow the range of “human living conditions” is completely bizarre to me, but I can see why someone from a place like the American Midwest might think this is true.
To me 0C is so much more meaningful than 0F, especially when talking about weather. The difference between -1C and 1C is something you can literally see around you. The difference between -1F and 1F is not.
Anything “below zero” is literally frozen and completely inhospitable to normal human life!
Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anyone with a birth day after the transition day will become two years younger when the change goes into effect, assuming the article’s description is correct (which it may not be.) Under the old system you were one year old at birth, and a year older at the beginning of the next year (not, as one might expect, at their next birth day.) That means at the beginning of the year on which under the more common system one…
Hold up... I don't mean to be critical of another countrys traditions and ways of counting, but WAT!. If you're born on say December 31st, then the very next day you're considered to be two years old? I can't imaging that it's particular practical to think of some one who has only been alive for a few days as being two years old. It's not even useful if you think of it as the child being "in their second year". Techn…
Their concept of a "two year old" is completely different from our concept. So though the words may translate the same, it's just a different definition. For them, it's equally weird to think that a child would go through a year of life being "0 years old."
Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 stan…
I liked that Estonia said "f*ck it, English is now the official second language." Meanwhile, in Switzerland, Zürich is contemplating making school children study English before French/Italian. That's great, except Switzerland is already quad-lingual, depending on canton. Making it more difficult for a german-speaking person in Zürich to go to Geneva probably won't be great for unity. Instead of all cantons adopting o…
> Instead of all cantons adopting one of the existing four as the universal language, they are now trying for English, it seems.
That’s likely deliberate and quite sensible, as elevating one of the existing four would probably cause disunity.
Something similar happened at the creation of the modern Indonesian state. Rather than elevating e.g. Javanese, they imported Malay as the neutral foundation of the Indonesian language.
Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hold up... I don't mean to be critical of another countrys traditions and ways of counting, but WAT!. If you're born on say December 31st, then the very next day you're considered to be two years old? I can't imaging that it's particular practical to think of some one who has only been alive for a few days as being two years old. It's not even useful if you think of it as the child being "in their second year". Techn…
Their concept of a "two year old" is completely different from our concept. So though the words may translate the same, it's just a different definition. For them, it's equally weird to think that a child would go through a year of life being "0 years old."
It just seems like they still used the age for things like: When do you start school, when can you vote, drink and so on, all of which in my mind has always been linked to some expectation of maturity (justified or not).
If school starts a six, then some of those children could be one to two years younger than others. For adult either way seems fine, there's little difference between 35 and 37, but for the youngest children it seems like it would make a huge difference.
Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting
#96Yet another battle won in the 0 indexing vs. 1 indexing war
Lua is the “last standing man” now.
Every language for scientific computation uses 1-based indexes, to follow the tradition of using them in formulas. FORTRAN, APL, Julia, R, MATLAB, GNU Octane, etc.
I remember that (some versions of) BASIC back in the day had an option to switch between 1-based and 0-based indexing, to appeal to both Fortran and C folks.
Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting
#97Ah 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.
Considering the magnitudes of the celebrations of the new millennium and 21st century on Jan 1 2000 vs 2001, I’d say that argument has been comprehensively won by the zero indexers already.
Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Alternative take: the US customary units have stuck around because SI has failed to present itself as better enough to switch. The thing that doesn't make sense about this argument – the US and the UK are the only major economies which haven't adopted metric for 90%+ of use cases. (Everywhere retains non-metric units in certain exceptional cases – e.g. most countries use feet for altitude in aviation, although that…
To play along with the argument, prior to the metric system, units were very local. So it’s not like China and Ghana and Russia and France were all using inches and feet and cups and pints, rather they were all using their own little units of measure, which on the whole turned out to be less convenient than the metric system. The UK and US happened to be (mostly) aligned on a more convenient system that could outcomp…
> So it’s not like China and Ghana and Russia and France were all using inches and feet and cups and pints, rather they were all using their own little units of measure, which on the whole turned out to be less convenient than the metric system. The UK and US happened to be (mostly) aligned on a more convenient system that could outcompete the metric system.
English units weren’t a “more convenient” system than that used by the rest of Europe. Before the metric system, France used feet and inches - and the French foot was composed of 12 French inches. The difference was that the French inch was a little bit longer than the English one - about 7%, although the ratio between the two varied over time, because before all this modern technology made it easier, maintaining consistent units was very hard. Feet and inches go back to the Roman Empire, but everyone ended up using a slightly different foot/inch. Even the US and UK used to use different inches (pre-1959), although the difference between the two was microscopic (but was considered important in US land surveying, since over hundreds of miles it can add up to several feet.) And today the US and UK still define non-metric volume measurements completely differently - the UK gallon is 20% larger than the US one
> And I think because we industrialized early, switching with the rest of the world was more expensive, so we stuck with it.
The problem with that argument is that US industry is actually more metricated than US everyday life. It is in domestic and consumer settings where the US lags the most in the adoption of the metric system; in industrial settings, it depends on the industry, but some US industries use metric heavily (for example, design and manufacturing of automobiles.)
Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting
#99Guess it's going to be easier to "surprise and delight users by displaying their birthday", at least once Omega Star gets their shit together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ
Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting
#100The day you turn 30 you begin your 31st year of life.