[h2s]

    > 'the publishing will only happen now' is the kind
    > of assumption that ends up being false very rapidly.

I think you're right, and part of the problem here is the time example clouding people's judgement. The fact that we as humans experience time as a continuous global phenomenon is irrelevant from a software engineering perspective. The current time is data no different from any other data.

It's not even difficult to think of an example of your point about the assumption quickly becoming false. Presumably our "publish" method exists within a blogging application. An extremely common feature in blogging software is some tool for importing posts from other blogging applications. In that situation, you need to be able to pass in the time as input.