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Comment by Qem | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Conception as a result of sex can take place up to one week after the act, even if it only happened once.

A error margin of +/- 7 days still beats a error of 9 months.

They could have fixed just that.

The Korean approach does not account for preconception well at all. It counts the number of calendar years a person has been present for postpartum.

A person's Korean age starts at 1 sal, and increments at New Years. A baby could be born on December and be 2 sal by January. A baby born in January would be 1 sal until next year, and be considered 1 sal younger than the December baby, even though they were only born 1 month apart. Everyone born in the same calendar year is in the same age cohort.

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.

But we call it a birthday.

Not everywhere. In portuguese, for example, is called Aniversário. With roots from latin annus(year) + vertere (to come back), meaning what comes back every year. There's no reference to the specific event of being born. Only that it's something that happens every year.

Her id states "birthday". It is quite literally called that and not just in English. The day she was born. Her id states the date she was born, stopped to nested inside another person, started to breath air and started to eat instead of getting oxygen and nutrition via placenta.

Her id does not state the day mom and dad had sex, nor the day the sperm joined the egg, nor the day she crossed the line from "few cells" to "something that resembles human in some sense".

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

The birth is clear and defined day. Trying to guess when the fetus was conceived would be ridiculous.

Yeah, and why stop there - you need to combine dates of sperm creation and egg creation, in the end fertilized egg is just a result of those 2 combining. Since eggs are created somewhere around development of the fetus IIRC, welcome to madness

> egg creation

yeah.. everyone gets an extra ~30 years of "age"

The latter is the only one of those two whose length you actually know.

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