this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If I say I have .473 liters of liquid how much is that?

That just seems like a strawman. What it boils down to is that when you convert from one system to another, conversions are not going to produce nice round numbers. There's nothing special about pints that make them the authoritative drink. Why not just go for a nice, round half liter?

I think what you're getting stuck on is the imperial system being the default for you instead of these both being human constructs.

[โ€“] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

No what you aren't getting is that the measurement units are arbitrary. However the divisors for those units is what makes the measurement system useful for people. If you are in construction it's much more useful to deal with whole numbers then it is to deal with fractions. Hence if you want a third of a foot, you want 4", not .166666 of a Meter. If you are drinking beer you count by the number of glasses of beer whatever size those happen to be, you don't count in Milliliters of beer. Measurements are supposed to be USEFUL to humans first and foremost, and moving a decimal to convert a unit to a different unit is trivial and can be done regardless of metric or not, and isn't really useful.