Incorrect Machineries of Empire Quotes

King beats soldier, who must bow to their orders.

Soldier beats poet, who has no defense against their violence.

Poet beats king, whose pride cannot stand the biting their satire.

Some ancient societies solved this by resetting their calendar based on an empirical observation, which works well enough when your principle concern is local agricultural matters. Others let their calendar drift with respect to the year, but periodically reset it. Yet others added consistent leap days or intercalary days. Modern timekeeping methodology has things like “Unix time,” which is a fixed number of elapsed seconds since a particular moment, and “UTC,” which has leap seconds and other nonsense so it consistently tracks astronomical data, for day-to-day scheduling purposes. Some countries simply split their civil and traditional/religious calendars (or whatever), which is honestly a pretty good idea even if it introduces another layer of complexity into your society.

The point is that reality is imperfect, and decaying around us always, even if only at timescales we can barely comprehend. Things like standardized units of time are just our feeble attempts to impose organization on the swirling chaos that surrounds and controls us; we create mental models and call them “seconds” and “hours” and “days” and “years”, while dedicated scientists work tirelessly to keep them in sync with the utter impermanence of the universe.

Some ancient societies solved this by resetting their calendar based on an empirical observation, which works well enough when your principle concern is local agricultural matters. Others let their calendar drift with respect to the year, but periodically reset it. Yet others added consistent leap days or intercalary days. Modern timekeeping methodology has things like “Unix time,” which is a fixed number of elapsed seconds since a particular moment, and “UTC,” which has leap seconds and other nonsense so it consistently tracks astronomical data, for day-to-day scheduling purposes. Some countries simply split their civil and traditional/religious calendars (or whatever), which is honestly a pretty good idea even if it introduces another layer of complexity into your society.

The point is that reality is imperfect, and decaying around us always, even if only at timescales we can barely comprehend. Things like standardized units of time are just our feeble attempts to impose organization on the swirling chaos that surrounds and controls us; we create mental models and call them “seconds” and “hours” and “days” and “years”, while dedicated scientists work tirelessly to keep them in sync with the utter impermanence of the universe.

Do I have a story for you…

So this is the iconic and beloved clock of Moszkva square in Budapest, Hungary. Or more precisely it was.

It was a very popular meeting point for generations.

„2pm on Moszkva, under the clock?” „sure” It was in the middle of the square, so you could see each other pretty easily from anywhere.

When they „renovated” (rebuilt) and renamed the square that is now called Széll Kálmán tér (only by youngsters and tourists who don’t know any better - it will remain for a lot of us „the Moszkva”) the old clock was removed.

So. Removing the clock was very controversial, but it had to go, because someone dreamed about a new shiny one. Here it is. New, and weird and DIGITAL.

The problem is, it stopped working. For days. (you see, fixing it was time-consuming…) And they came and fix it. But it broke down in a couple of days again and again, so the lovely people around helped to fix it. Some of the best solutions:

Graffity: ?Is this a clock? No" and Where is the old clock? Furthermore, on the clock it states that it shows the right time.

An artistic rendition:

But my favorite one is where people got enough of the breaking down abomination, and the heartless people taking down the actually working clocks (it is a very busy square with a lot of public transport connections), and things escalated quickly:

I think this is the most of them we had taped on at once.

The papers state: In memoriam of the unknown time. Rest in Peace