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.
PowerCrazy
joined 1 year ago
A few nations have. The USSR, the US for Mars and Several nations have crashed things into the moon, unintentionally, including Israel and India. So maybe the problem wasn't the metric system and something a lot more meaningful instead of what specific arbitrary unit of measurement you think is "better."
e: Like look at this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_Mars There are more failures then successes, and only one of those failures was because of different units used for two related measurements. It's weird to even bring it up as a point about the metric system.
Decimals are absolutely not intuitive. Whole numbers are. If I say I have .473 liters of liquid how much is that? Sure it's 473ml's but how much is that? A lot a little? Could you drink that much? Should you drink that much? If I say, let's go have a pint of beer, then you would obviously say, sure, maybe two. The amount is the same, but way you think about it is more important.
By the way, 8 pints of beer is gallon, so if you say I don't want to drink a gallon of beer, you'll know you should stop at 7 pints. But no one is going to say I can only drink 3.3liters of beer tonight. They may say, I promised my wife no more then 7beers (or 3 that number doesn't matter), the point is you want to measure things in whole numbers for human-centric activities.
What about time? That's base-60, and one of the most useful measurements we have.
It's not about thirds and fourths per se. It's actually about lack of divisors. In our current metric system of base 10. We have two divisors, 2 and 5. That's it. No matter if you are talking kilometer, gigameter's whatever, it's just 2's and 5's The imperial system uses more divisors to make the system more useful. There are 5280 feet in a mile. But why? Well because that number has divisors of 2,3,5 and 11. Which allows you a lot of flexibility for how you want to divide a mile. Or think about time, 3600 seconds in an hour, 24hrs in a day, that's a lot of ways you can easily divide up time. The ability to divide these arbitrary units of time is what makes them useful.
Hot Take, the metric system, being a base-10 system sucks for task where you want to make thirds/fourths of something to come out as a round number. It's like the people who are huge proponents of metric don't know the purpose of a human-centric systems of measurement and think that the ascetics of appending "kilo" or "milli" to something is the purpose on it's own.
We already know how to stop climate change, but we, as in capitalist society, does not want to.
I have known that "free-range" was a marketing gimmick that was created to help assuage the guilt of people living in an alienating society to differentiate food brands. It has nothing to do with any actual animal husbandry practices which are nearly identical amongst all the worlds abattoirs.
It's good that people are aware of where their food comes from. It's an emotional mile-stone that children must overcome to be well adjusted individuals.
Which policy is that? Does it have a built in way to prevent accumlation of wealth? Maybe a death tax? Maybe some nationalizing of industry's? No? Then it sounds like you are the one out of touch.