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Comment by jioawpfj | Hacker News Reader

in the event an EMP knocks out all your electronics, is having a functioning watch something that really matters?

also, where are you that an EMP is a realistic concern?

I do a fair bit of camping. One solo trip, I opted to leave behind all the normal gadgets and discovered I had no chronological tooling with. Skies were overcast -- and I suspect I ate breakfast early, lunch by 8, and supper by noon. Was surprisingly disquieting to have a few days in a row without knowing where the sun was in the sky.

My go to practical watch is the casio terrorist watch. Only costs a few $, gets 10 years on one battery, can take a beating. And I don't care if I break it.

On normal days I just wear an Apple Watch and I can't ever bring myself to wear one of my fancy watches because I love the fitness tracking features.

If you are the only one with a working watch, is your time definitionally correct, off by a bit, or completely incorrect?

As long as we haven't lost the sun too, we can sort it all out again reasonably quickly.

Now you have introduced an additional variable (location) to the equation.

Especially as mechanical watches drift a few minutes each day.

It must be exceptionally bad mechanical watches you are used to

The drift is affected by movement right? I imagine sitting on a table they are much more accurate than swinging around on an arm all day.

Perhaps, but they're engineered to minimize such effect. I noted in another comment I started with a Seiko 5, one of the cheapest, most inaccurate movements (being the name for the timekeeping mechanism itself), and I see multi-minute differences after weeks without adjustment. I'm not a daily runner or anything (in which I'd use my smartwatch anyways), but my job does involve a fair amount of getting up and walking between places, as well as the temperature shift of controlled environment rooms for computers and SoCal outdoor heat.

A few seconds each day, unless you have a really bad or poorly maintained watch.

    in the event an EMP knocks out all your electronics, 
    is having a functioning watch something that really
    matters?

If you know what time it is, you can use your watch as a fairly accurate compass in an emergency.

https://www.citizenwatch-global.com/s/support/exterior/direc...

Even as the world ends, I will enjoy a few last perfectly soft boiled eggs over my camp stove, and contemplate the meaning of existence. And a major US metropolitan area, near several military bases, airports, and missile launch sites. So more than most of the population.

On a more serious note, as a bit of a "prepper" - it's not hard to cover the essentials. Once past that, working timepieces greatly simplify coordination and other group efforts. Additionally, I would expect decent trade value out of them, should the unlikely but tragic circumstances occur.

You can make a solar clock in your fictional scenario.

not precise enough to soft boil eggs, and not as easily as remembering to wear my automatic for an hour a day, or wind my manuals once per day.

I'm failing to understand why this is so contentious outside of "anti-prepper" attitudes.

I’m just saying that if you’re choosing a lower-tech time piece so that you’re ready for an apocalypse you might as well know all your post-apocalyptic options like a sand timer for your boiled eggs.

I live near the centre of a very large city (London) so I feel like the best I have to look forward to in that kind of scenario is to set up some environmental storytelling in the form of wall graffiti and then die in some comical way like having a black cab fall on me

I too live in inner London. I figure the only way you have a chance of surviving if stuff really went to hell is to bicycle as far away as possible - probably towards Wales.

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