But we have found a nearly-perfect way to measure time. Doesn't that say a lot?

It absolutely does. You can be a morning person, you can be a night owl, you can be late, you can be early, it can be spring, it can be fall, it can be twelve minutes to midnight, time be time, mon.

And you're right - I'm trained as an engineer. I had dreams of being a designer but when I discovered that they have no control or input into the actual mechanics of a thing (other than often complicating the simple) I opted out. Slagging on designers has been a pastime of mine for decades.

You sound like a designer - you're looking for capital-T Truths. I'm an engineer - everything has a fudge factor. Designers wish to make statements. Engineers wish to solve problems.

I think I see where our disagreement actually lies (and it's been a hell of a debate, so thanks for your patience). I look at WGS84 and know that it's a standard that's 33 years old but that every standard that came before it has been incorporated in it and that there is a heritage of cartesian map coordinates dating back to like 200BC. And I know that the lats'n'longs from 200BC were good enough, and when they weren't, they were translated into another system that was good enough and so on and so forth.

I don't need capital-T truth. I need "good enough." I know that "good enough" works well in the service of those who seek capital-T truth and I recognize that my job is to give them the tools they need for their seeking.

The life-blood of many American cities was drained when we redesigned everything for the automobile. I see that as a tragedy, and I recognize that it's exactly the example the author should have used (but didn't) when describing the design of different transport systems for different cultures. The white folx out in the 'burbs got a quick way to the mall while the poor folx in the city got six lanes of vehicular oblivion between them and the park and that fuckin' sucks. It's a usage issue, it's a cartographic issue, it's a culture issue, it's a technological issue.

But we're talking mapping now, we're talking data. The particulate load at GPS xxx on date X/Y/Z was nnn. That's a universal truth. It is a data point, it is a context-free fact ready to be contextualized however scientists, designers, poets, artists, whatever choose to contextualize it. The author, on the other hand, says bilious shit like this:

Yet it’s difficult to use maps to address structural inequality when geospatial data aren’t equitably distributed.

No it's not. Go get the fuckin' data. In fact, the paragraph I listed that from is a procedural listing of ways to get the fuckin' data.

My fundamental argument is that the data doesn't care. Do not assign intentions and motives to the data. People care - people care a lot, and they should care a lot. What people do with data is pretty much... science. And science policy. And therefore policy. And therefore vital.

I don't think universality is the norm. I think we naturally approximate our world to the precision we need to interact with it and no more. I think from the standpoint of the article, the maps we're making now are of greater precision than we (as people) need by far... but I'm sure they aren't nearly as precise as our gadgets would use in an ideal case.

And I think that the "good enough" we need can come out of the "greater precision" of the gadgets without anybody's freeze peaches being taken.