Everyday, as an American
Everyday, as an American
322 comments
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While we are at it, let's all (as in the entire planet) switch to 24hour UTC and the YYYY.MM.DD date format.
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While we at that, lets switch to the international fixed calendar as well.
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That one feels kinda meh to me. It solves a handful of non-issues with our current calendar (I don't care that the month starts on the same day, nor do I care that each day of the year is always the same day of the week). Each months having the same number of days is an improvement. It persists the problem that you still can't use months or years as a real mathematical unit of measure and extends it to weeks, which is the biggest annoyance with calendars, although it reduces how often that becomes significant. Adding two days that have neither a day of the week nor month would mean significant changes to every computer system that needs to deal with dates, and is just hateful.
The 1st of a month to the 1st of the next will always be one month, but it depends on the month and year how many days that is. So a month as a duration will span either 28 or 29 days. A week is now sometimes 8 days, and a year might still have 365 or 366 days, depending on the year.
How do you even write the date for the days that don't fit? Like, a form with a box for the date needs to be able to handle Y-M-D formatting but also Y-YearDay. Probably people would just say 06-29 and 12-29, or 07-00 and 01-00, although if year day is the last day of the year it kinda gets weird to say the last day of the year is the zeroth day of the first month of the next year.There's just a lot of momentum behind a 12 month year with every day being part of a month and week. Like, more than 6000 years. You start to run into weird issues where people's religion dictates that every seventh days is special which we've currently built into our calendar.
Without actually solving significant issues, it's just change for changes sake.
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Since we're breaking everything, I want to use dozenal with the Pitman symbols and "deck/el" pronunciations.
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Move New Years back to march 1st, then the Latin roots will be accurate again.
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YYYY.MM.DD and 24 hour for sure.
Everyone using UTC? Nah. Creates more problems than it solves (which are already solved, because you can just lookup what time it is elsewhere, and use calendars to automatically convert, etc.).
I for one do not want to do mental gymnastics /calculation just to know what solar time it is somewhere else. And if you just look up what solar time it is somewhere, we've already arrived back at what we're already doing.
Much easier just looking up what time (solar) time it is in a timezone. No need to re-learn what time means when you arrive somewhere on holiday, no need for movies to spell out exactly where they are in the world whenever they speak about time just so you know what it means. (Seriously, imagine how dumb it would be watching international films and they say: "meet you at 14 o'clock", and you have no idea what solar time that is, unless they literally tell you their timezone.)
Further, a lot more business than currently would have to start splitting their days not at 00:00 (I'm aware places like nightclubs do this already).
Getting rid of timezones makes no sense, and I do not understand why people on the internet keep suggesting it like it's a good idea.
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I'm pretty sure they don't mean "give up on time zones" but "express your timezone in UTC". For example, central Europe is UTC+1. Makes almost no difference in everyday life, only when you tell someone in another zone your time. The idea is to have one common reference point and do the calculation immediately when someone gives you their UTC zone. For example, if you use pacific time and tell me that, it means nothing to me, but if you say "UTC-8" I know exactly what time it is for you.
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Seconded.
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That's good for file/record sorting, so let's just use it for that
For day to day, DD.MM.YY is much more practical.
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Hard disagree.
Least specific -> most specific is generally better in spoken language as the first part spoken is the part the listener begins interpreting.
Like if I ask if you're free on "the 15th of March" vs "March 15", the first example is slightly jarring for your brain to interpret because at first it hears "15th" and starts processing all the 15ths it's aware of, then "March" to finally clarify which month the 15th is referencing.
The only thing practical about DD.MM.YY is that it is easier for the speaker because they can drop the implied information, or continue to add it as they develop the sentence.
"Are you free on the 15th" [oh shit, that's probably confusing, I meant a few months from now] "of July" [oh shit, I actually mean next summer not this one] "next year (or 2025)".
So the format is really a question of who is more important in spoken language: the speaker or the listener? And I firmly believe the listener is more important, because the entire point of communication is to take the idea you've formulated into your head, and accurately describe that idea in a way that recreates that same idea in the listener's head. Making it easier for the speaker to make a sentence is pointless if the sentence itself is confusing to the listener. That's literally a failure to communicate.
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I am once again asking for yyyy-mm-dd
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ISO8601 crew represent!
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I get SO frustrated when I see a date like 4/3/2024 and have to spend time trying to figure out if it's the 4th of March, or if some US company wrote the software I'm using and it has defaulted to silly format.
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Try working for an American company while not living in America. I have spent years trying to convince my US colleagues to please use unambiguous date formats when sending email to a global audience. But no.... they just can't see why it would be necessary or even helpful to do that.
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As a mechanical design engineer in America having dual systems creates unnecessary complexity and frustration and cost for me all day, every day. I full force embrace switching to metric
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as a mechanic working in a hodgepodge US/EU factory line, I have to suffer through always carrying double the tools to service metric and SAE machines. and after so many years in the industry, I still slip up and say 3/16 when I mean 3/8 sometimes, because fractions are a shit system for wrenches.
oh, and some of our linear encoders readout decimal-feet, because fuck it, why not?
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My condolences. I'm already annoyed with the times USC units are presented in Australia (our nominal pipe sizes are often talked about in inches, and sometimes valves and such have USC flow coefficients because the manufacturer is American).
So I cannot imagine the pain you must be subjected to.
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Metric yes please. Also for fucks sake use the 24 hour clock. Some of us learned it from the military but it’s just earth time and way easier than adding letters to a number
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the 24 hour clock
I switched to it in my later teens when I realised how many cases it would be better in.
Conversion during conversation might be an extra step, but I'll be pushing for the next generation to have this by default.Also, much better when using for file names.
Also, YYYY-MM-DD. There's a reason why it is the ISO
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The conversion is pretty much the only hurdle I ever hear about, but that’s easy enough. How many songs/films talk about “if I could rewind the last 12+12 hours”…it’s just a matter of making it fit in context people can understand when they know a day is 24 but are used to 12.
ISO and while we’re at it, the NATO phonetic alphabet for English speakers. “A as in apple B as in boy” means fuck all when you’re grasping for any word that starts with that letter, and if English isn’t your first language fuckin forget about it.
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Why no base10 clock?
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You don't need to add or multiply time very often. Division is super important tho, and base60 is better than base10 for that.
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Too easy. Plus we put in the 3/5 “compromise” so you can’t expect old white racists to learn proper math
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The French did try it back when they were in the process of changing to the metric system in the 1700s. Even THEY quickly determined that, much like the creation of the universe, it was a very bad idea. And it was very quietly dropped. French tried hard to scrub that moment of insanity from the history books. But well, the internet is truly forever in both directions I guess.
Metric time quickly got out of sync with the periods of light and dark. Mother Nature evidently doesn't like humans dicking around with the time periods of her celestial movements. (Dozenal for the win!)
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The 12 hour one is just so wildly dumb and inconsistent.
Why does it go from 11 AM to 12 PM to 1 PM?
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Why would you demand metric everything and not metric time?
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Cause then we’d be thinking we’re monkeys on a spherical rock in a vacuum instead of calibrating clocks to a radioactive element to make sure everyone tunes in to wheel of fortune on time while this oblate spheroid tumbles around
Also, it’s hard enough getting people to equate Km and C with known quantities, Americans can’t handle base unit shifts like that
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If America is going to go through the trouble to convert everything to metric, might as well switch to base 10/decimal time as well lol
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I love the 24 hour clock and living in London, UK I used it all the time. However, I remember one time I bought movie tickets at lunch for 17:30 and my brain thought it was for 7:30pm and I called my friend at the last moment saying: "you have to leave work early if we're gonna make it!"
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There was a beautiful time back when I was young where we tried to change to metric and schools taught us nothing but. Now I'm ~50 years old and don't even know how many pints are in a gallon. Or feet in a mile. Always forget whether it's 12 or 16 that's inches in a foot / ounce to pound. Always have to look that shit up. Because they didn't teach us that garbage. Ever.
Guess what I NEVER have to look up? The measurements that tell you in their fucking prefixes how many X are in Y. What a concept.
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Don't worry. You likely wouldn't remember even if you were taught. 5280 feet/mile is just not worth the brain space. Neither is 8 pints/gallon. I don't think you would convert between the two often enough to make it useful information to just know.
And I do have to look up those prefixes for the less used ones. It's exa then peta or peta then exa and what's bigger than them? What's smaller than nano? I don't remember because it rarely comes up. But I'm in tech, so it's starting to more.
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I remember 5280 despite being Australian because I saw that stupid mnemonic tweet. I remember the SI prefixes because of xkcd.
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We should have gone metric in the 70s. This year will be the 45th anniversary of the Metric Conversion Act, which was signed on December 23, 1975, by President Gerald R. Ford. You may have even seen a map that has been incriminatingly illustrated to show how they are out of step with the rest of the world. It’s a compelling story and often repeated, but you might be surprised to learn that it’s simply untrue!
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Metric has been legally "preferred" in the US since 1975. We just don't use it.
Also while I was looking up that year I came across this wild factoid:
In 1793, Thomas Jefferson requested artifacts from France that could be used to adopt the metric system in the United States, and Joseph Dombey was sent from France with a standard kilogram. Before reaching the United States, Dombey's ship was blown off course by a storm and captured by pirates, and he died in captivity on Montserrat.
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If you pretend to be a confused foreigner you can make them do math
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Suddenly trying to convince all my friends and family I'm from France.
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The irony is a real foreigner could probably do maths better than them.
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You could always use the metric system, that was always allowed. Most food (I've seen) has both imperial and metric measurements. Most digital measuring devices and lots of analog ones will have options for both. Speedometers generally have both.
Really, the only one stopping you from using the metric system in your daily life is you. Unless of course you're saying you want other people to use it. Which is a distinctly different proposition.
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I'd argue the two greatest barriers for the average, non-STEM individual adopting metric in America is the speed limits being in mph and the temperature being in °F. Both are convertible easily enough, but when you constantly have to do so to engage with critical infrastructure or safety (cooking temps, etc.) It provides a barrier against adoption for anyone without the drive to make a concerted effort to use metric.
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Between the two, I think temperature is the harder one. But strangely, it also brings weight and volume back into it: Cookbooks.
So many recipes are finely tuned balances of measurements that just look plain alien when converted to metric.
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I'm a scientist. I've used the metric system since grade school. In fact, I convert Imperial measurements to metric to do estimates.
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Engineer here, I just use whatever's convenient. It's handy to know both.
That said, I did confuse a poor coworker of mine this week when I was using bar for tank pressure and psi for the safety reliefs. That's totally on me though.
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You can't have it because of peer pressure from dead people. You gotta take them seriously, motherfuckers will haunt your ass and say shit like "thirty fathoms, gold dubloons and schooners, twenty nickel shillings". We have the metric system in our country and the ghosts suck, they don't even try to come up with sensical nonsense phrases for the sake of the bit, the lazy bastards.
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I dunno, it'd probably be better but there's nothing stopping people from using metric in places where it makes sense. I write most of my recipes in grams because it makes them easier to multiply or divide.
At the same time, the most common thing people use units for is a point of reference, and it really makes no difference whether your point of reference is metric or traditional units.
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Be the change you want to see in the world. Use the metric system.
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I'm a machinist, I don't get to choose my units. We use standard and try to avoid metric dimensioning like the plague. The difference between .005 inches and .005 millimeters is literally an order of magnitude.
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I did it all the time. But I'm not american.
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Dammit people, we need to stay focused. First abolish DST THEN institute the metric system! We have to have our priorities in order and stay organized or we will never accomplish anything!
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Why not just metric, so we can get those metric seconds, then daylight time wouldn't matter anymore.
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Why do you want the sun to set early?
I'd rather have an extra hour of sun after work than an hour of sun before work
I think most people enjoy DST. Most complain when it's dark at 5 pm.
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I don't give the first two half-flaccid thrusts of a reluctant pity fuck what number the clock says when the sun rises or sets. 4, 5, 6, 11, don't care. It's the practice of changing the clocks twice a year that needs to die in a fire.
The logic should be "Let's open our business from 7 to 4 instead of 8 to 5 so that we have more free time during sunlight hours in the evening" not "Let's change all the clocks everywhere so that the sun is two fingers higher in the sky when the clocks say 5 so that we have more free time during the sunlight hours in the evening." You want to vary YOUR routine with the seasonal change in sunlight hours? Great. "Summer hours 7 to 4, winter hours 8 to 5" or whatever. Managing this by changing all clocks everywhere causes more problems than it solves. I don't know if I could intentionally invent a stupider solution to the "problem."
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You think that because it's how you feel or you have different stats on opinions taken from large samples in an unbiased fashion that lead you to believe this?
If it's the former please see https://paylesspower.com/blog/beyond-the-clock-exploring-the-nations-pulse-on-daylight-saving-time/
If the latter, please consider sharing your data.
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If we abolish DST, I think we should tweak some of our timezones. With dst, where I'm at the sun is currently rising before 5. If we kept standard time, it would be up before 4. Sun rise at 3 something and sunset at 7 something is really out of whack with how most people want sun allocated to their day.
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Natural Gas companies: No, MMBTU/scf or bust!
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You could drive this one stretch https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/i19-americas-only-metric-interstate
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I ended up on this last year as I was exploring the South West. I found it confusing even as a Canadian.
I then later was confusion when Google Maps told me to go 80 on Hwy 10 in Texas once I came up from Big Bend NP. I thought the GPS was confused. 80 kms on the highway in the US? It was then I realized I wasn't in Oregon anymore with their 60 mph highways. Texas goes fast and even 80 mph isn't enough for most people. Even the single lane highways with construction workers was 65 mph work zones in Texas.
It was the most amount of road kill I've ever seen in all my travels. I think at one stage a herd of goats must of tried to cross the highway based on the carnage I came across. I finally understood the reason for the huge bumpers on the front of trucks in Texas now.
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that's technically I-30.5
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A few years ago I started using Celsius in my everyday life. It's been pretty easy, just remember that C scales twice as fast as F, and 32F=0C and you're set for conversations. It helps to be quick with math, but finding it difficult may make it easier to convince other people to use it instead of F near you. To acclimate yourself you'll want to change the settings on your phone to use C by default.
I haven't switched over to m in everyday use, because all the roadsigns are in Mph and doing that conversion while driving is bad juju.
I'm thinking of rewriting all my recepies in grams and liters. If I can figure out how to get our stupidly-over-designed-yet-entirely-jank oven to use C, that'd be good too. If we had one with a bimetalic strip and a knob I'd be able to just print one with the new temperature scale.
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Honestly, temperature (in terms of weather preparedness, not cooking) makes WAY more sense with Fahrenheit. Largely the only temperatures you care about are 0 to 100 and generally you feel a good difference in temp every 10 degrees F.
Almost everything else I prefer metric. But that's one where Celsius is just terrible.
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So, uh, no? In fact within the "human spectrum" you generally care at least somewhat about every tick of the number. So it's actually more useful for people.
Because I doubt you can feel the difference between 71f and 72f. But it's possible to notice the difference between 21 and 22, although you're pretty picky if you do.
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Tread lightly my friend. I already won the Fahrenheit vs. Celsius debate a few months ago, but non-Americans are insanely defensive about the metric system and won't accept the truth.
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/9757434
I'll transcribe my best arguments because that thread was an absolute shitshow and it's hard to find my comment even with the direct link. Almost all of my most downvoted comments on Lemmy came during my defense of the Fahrenheit temperature scale, and I'm weirdly proud of that fact.
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The UK continues to use miles when discussing speed and distance. The road signs use imperial units.
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I was born in northern England in the early 90s, and I can only eyeball in imperial units, even though I now live in a country where they only use metric (and Beaufort).
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Actually, we're on the metric system. The foot and inch are defined exactly by their metric conversion values, and so is the pound
We're actually just using conversion factors
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Rock it like a Brit. Most things in metric except for your height (feet and inches) and your car speed (miles per hour) and when you measure your manhood (inches... Or fractions thereof).
Also, milk is pints.
Land is acres.
And the ponies run furlongs.
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... and our weight is in Stones.
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Right you are g'vnor
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It's even funnier when you take a look at The Highway Code: distances can be measured in miles, yards, kilometers or meters depending on what type of distance you're talking about.
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Technically the US is using the metric system. Per the Mendenhall Order of 1893, all customary length and mass units were redefined to be based on international metric standards. The Imperial system units commonly used in the US are just conversion factors of metric units.
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Fine, fine, Ill use celsius.
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"Fuck me it's hot today"
"Yeah it's at least four washing machines Celsius bro"
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Top text: Why metric system is needed
Middle text is mostly blurred, but "easier to count - less time to waste" is seen.
Bottom text: for all times and for all people
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We have it in Canada. Do you want to borrow ours?
The reality is that the US uses the metric system but everything is translated into freedom units for the general population. Another situation where you believe against all evidence that you have something that you really don't have.
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We measure in whales, giraffes, and hamburgers around here homie.
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Look I get it, but also, I like fahrenheit and miles. They are more intuitive and closer to the 'feeling'. 100 degrees is really hot. 100 mph is really fast. Maybe that's my own bias from growing up with it though
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Yeah, I think it's mostly just a familiarity thing. To me 0°C is cold af, 10°C is chilly, 20°C is nice and 30°C is hot. 100 km/h is fast but not really fast, though I'm probably biased in this regard from regularly driving on the Autobahn lol
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exactly! whenever anyone says imperial units are "more intuitive" and better reflect "how it feels to humans", i can only think: obviously, you grew up with it. that's what you know.
no matter what measurement system you were raised on, it will feel intuitive to you and reflect how you as a human experience the world because you are used to measuring things in those units. having said that, i'd much rather we used metric if for nothing else than the ease of unit conversion.
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The temperatures are intuitive for me because Celsius is all I've known. The car going 60km/h or 100km/ h I know the difference and how it feels sitting in the car. The speed of wind in the forecast needs to be m/s to make any sense. Over 20 m/s I better tape the windows so that the storm won't break them
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That's an artefact of the "now".
In Australia we once had the imperial system and about a year after the big switch (14 Feb 1966) we became all metric like a mofo. Now 35c feels hot and 15c feels cold. Plus units of ten is so much easier than factions.
Ask the US military about the metric system, they've been using it since at least Vietnam, if not earlier.
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Not only is 100C is also really hot, it's the boiling point of water. Now that's a 100 degrees that really stands for something.
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"intuitive" in the sense you described just means "familiar". One feels like one. Ten feels like ten.
The magic of metric isn't that each base unit is somehow more valuable in metric. It isn't. One will always feel like one.
The magic is how easy it is to convert from the "small one", the "medium one" and the "big one".
Also, the convention of fractional inches is ridiculous.
It should be trivial to order 27/64, 3/8, and 7/16. Don't make me do that math.
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Hard disagree on the fractional units. Using rational numbers for those things derives from the frequency with which people need to double and halve things in the fields that use those conventions. Doubling 3/8 to get 6/8 or 3/4 is much easier than doubling .375 to get .75
That one's nothing to do with the metric system vs imperial, aside from the fields that rely on the convention being largely the ones that created imperial in the first place. If they all switched to metric tomorrow they'd just say they need 3/5 meter spacing.
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I feel the same way about Fahrenheit, but boy do people hate it when you say it out loud.
I've never had to use Kilometers much but I'm sure I wouldn't have much trouble adapting to that as much.
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How would you even measure "They are more intuitive and closer to the 'feeling'". It's not. You're used to it. No one else in the world that grew up with C is going to find F more intuitive. Neither miles.
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I'm a European living in the UK for 9 years. I still don't know what a mile is. There's nothing intuitive about Imperial units, you're just used to them.
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Yeah, and the benefits of switching does not out weigh the costs, like redoing all the signage and re-educating everyone and inevitable higher accident rate.
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/JYqfVE-fykk
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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Freedom units!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(No, we really should get it over with at some point....)
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If we switched to metric, everything we currently have built will suddenly have weird measurements. I don't want my 10 foot even high ceiling to be 3.048 meters. 😩 /s
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Yep, this is why all the buildings spontaneously exploded in places that changed to metric. /s
Things get phased out. Certain buildings will adhere to old code and new ones would adhere to new codes in metric.
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I'll measure in miniature Jack Daniel bottles before I give up mph
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I'll preface this by saying that this isn't an argument in favor of the imperial system, nor is it an argument intending to detract from the usefulness of the metric system. But I have wondered if there is some merit to having a simple, colloquial, "human friendly" system of measurement — something that's shown to be the best system for people to grok, and is the most convenient to use in day-to-day life. If you need precision, and well defined standards, then certainly use the metric system, but is the metric system easy for people to grok? Say you ask someone to estimate a length. Would they be more likely to accurately estimate the length using the metric system, the imperial system, or some other system? Likewise for telling someone a length and asking them to physically reproduce it. Would they be more likely to do so with the metric system, the imperial system, or some other? It's an interesting problem, imo, and it doesn't seem to get much attention.
It could very well be that people can, indeed, grok measurements the best when using the metric system, but I currently am unaware of any research that has been done to show that. If anyone is aware of any research that has looked into this, then please let me know! I'd be very interested to read it.
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Lol, I'm sorry you're getting downvoted for speculating about improving weights and measures in a thread about wanting better weights and measures.
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That's a feature supporters of imperial thinks it has. Even if imperial/some special third option is better for guessing, the difference has to be big enough that it's worth the hassle of having multiple systems or converting everyone again. If it's not worth having two systems but it is worth converting everything , then you still have to keep or prove that it's worth losing the conveniences of metric like 1 km = 1000 m , 1 L of water weighing 1 kg , water freezing and boiling at 0 and 100 °C
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I'm not, but I'm old as shit, and don't really give a fuck.
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Old people using inches: https://youtu.be/EUpwa0je6_Y
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/EUpwa0je6_Y
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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Again, who’s gonna pay for the conversion? Sure we could switch like the Aussies did, but no one wants to pay for new shit when the shit that already exists serves its purpose well enough.
Get the financing, and then come back.
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just make all new things metric as the primary unit and US imperial as the secondary. eg. reverse the display on a speedometer
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Seconding that. Slow phase is the way - as the old shit breaks, replace it with metric. Not just for cost, but to ease folks into it.
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Who's gonna pay for not converting (which is much more expensive)?
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Just start doing it now and eventually things will have converted. It may take a while, but it will happen eventually if you do it consistently.
But there are too many contrarian Americans out there who'll take inconvenience over logic just because it "the American way" or "America is special." Have several of those people in my extended family.
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It's here Sunshine. And it's been the law, for what 50 years now?
So go to the store and buy a 2 liter of your favorite soda pop, 454g of butter, 2 1/4kilos of potatoes, a half kilo of tomatoes, and a 750ml bottle of whisk(e)y. Then get out your wrenches and use the 10mm to tighten that wobbly leg on that chair. Oh, your 10mm wrench is missing too? Well, do you have a 160mm adjustable wrench? No? I have one here in my tool box use that one.
Oh, you want it in your car? You either just need to read the other scale printed on the speedometer or just push a button. Instant metric system.
The metric system is here. You use it and your too blind to see it.........Most 'Muricans are either trying too hard to be edgy or they are just dumb I guess.
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Celsius is how hot water feels. Fahrenheit is how hot humans feel.
One is clearly more applicable for day-to-day life.
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One is clearly more applicable for day-to-day life.
And yet, 96% of the world uses the "wrong" system....
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either are fine, just depends if you were raised using it or not
but one of them can be used easily simultaneously on day to day and science anywhere in the world
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Well, mostly. You still need to use Kelvin so you don't get negative numbers for sciencing, but using them simultaneously for both day-to-day and science is nowhere near as common. Most people just want to know what to wear, and using Celsius loses a lot of the fidelity that Fahrenheit gives. This is after I spent 2 years only looking up the weather in Celsius so that I could get a feel for each degree of difference, and ended up just getting frustrated at how the same degree temperature in Celsius could feel drastically different to me when it's actually a 2-3 degree difference in Fahrenheit.
Also, FWIW, British people love to use Fahrenheit when it's over 100 degrees because it 'feels hotter' to say that than '37', but they also love using Celsius when it's below freezing, as it 'feels colder' to say negative numbers instead of numbers in their teens or twenties. It's more psychology than anything, but Fahrenheit still definitely has its practical uses, and I'm not ditching it anytime soon.
We can ditch feet/yards/miles though. Meters definitely make more sense in that regard.
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Metric speeds are stupid tho. Is 55kph fast or slow? Who tf knows. Meters, liters, celsius and grams are all chad units though.
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This comment is bizarre to me. Is 35 mph fast or slow? Because it is the same as 55 kph ( km/h ).
55 km/h is an odd speed though it is true. Most towns in Canada for example, the default speed limit is 50 km/h. Highway speeds are more like 100 km/h.
Speeds in mph seem more intuitive to you?
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Is 55kph fast or slow?
Depends on context. Usually road signs.
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for a bullet? slow.
for a snail? fast.
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Why are there angry European posts and comments on this every freaking day as if each and every one of us who live under the American system of weights and measurements are personally responsible for implementing and keeping the system?
I'm comfortable in either format.
It doesn't chafe my balls to talk in metric or to see signs or containers in metric. Why does every god damned European feel like they're missing out on diaper powder every time an American talks about miles or fahrenheit?
Who hurt you? What damage does this really cause you?
Are there no other fucking issues that matter? We're gonna blow this whole fucking planet up if Jim Bob in Missouri doesn't start talking in liters God damnit!
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Each and every time this comes up. I say that I am familiar with the metric system and use it for quite a few things, but I specifically prefer woodworking in fractional inches because working in base 12 and power-of-two fractions is closer to the tasks I need to perform in the wood shop than base ten decimal math does.
I give real-world examples like "divide 19mm, a commonly used stock thickness, by three to make a tenon, you get something point 3333 repeating of course" and they 1. downvote and 2. Invent sizes that we don't conventionally mill stock to thinking they found a "gotcha." "Well what's 2 inches divided by three?" we don't mill stock to 2 inches thick, we'd use 1 1/2", a third of which is 1/2". Y'all actually do use 19mm.
But Americans use inch fractions so inch fractions must be dumb and bad, right?
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I would not mind if americans used whatever. As long as anything exported from america always!! used metric. As it is now we need 2 complete sets of nuts and bolts, pipes and fittings, tools and gizmos, csbles and connectors. Just imagine the space we could save in our shops and storages if we could /2 the requires spare part storage. Not to mention the time and frustration avoided when doing basically anything on almost anything.
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Yeah it really only matters what you are comfortable with, if you get units you aren't comfortable with then it gets confusing. I almost feel like metric folk don't realize that the USA is like 50 EU states in size, and this disconnect causes them some rage at seeing imperial units. At the human level I still can't comprehend Celsius, mostly cuz those numbers have meanings in fahrenheit, sure makes for some cognitive dissonance to heard 35 degrees thinking you would need snow gear to hearing it's unbearably hot.
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Nah, let's stick to Freedom Units! 🗽
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The metric system is fine in a lab. But, in terms of basic human living the imperial system, which wasn't designed so much as developed over years of usage, is simply superior. It works better and is generally more convenient and flexible.
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[Citation needed]
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You neef their ass?
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Nah, what're you talking about?
Case in point: whose foot?
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