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this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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Showerthoughts
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No one in the US knows WTF a long and short ton are. A ton is 2k lbs. And most Americans probably don't even know the exact weight of a ton outside of "a shit load."
For the most part, we generally only use pounds, feet, miles. Everything else is a mystery. Even ounces, cups and gallons are some fucking magical mystery. Just follow the recipe.
I switched everything to metric years ago, and have never been happier. It made a huge difference in most of the things I do, having a system that makes internal sense. The only thing I still routinely use standard for is sewing, because it's damn near impossible to find any patterns or things like cutting mats in metric in the right sizes for quilting.
There recently was a discussion on lemmy where several US citizens (one of them allegedly an engineer…) tried to explain to me that metric might be „more precise“ (? 😂) but the imperial system more practical, because „everybody knows what a foot is“. When I asked them to add feet to miles I got shouted at (in CAPS) that noone (ever) does that. 🤷♀️
I mean, if you're converting feet to miles, you're doing something weird.
How many 39 ft rails do you need to build a 100 mile railroad?
Why on Earth would I ever do that?
If I was a rail engineer, I would have a chart (or a calculator if its past the year 1980)
Can you divide 1000 by 39 quickly and easily?
It’s called an example. Want another one? How many laps do you need to run on a 400 m track to run a 10k? How many people can you serve with your 2.5 kg steak if everybody needs to get a 250 g steak? Need more?
Heres the thing, your examples suck because there are no good examples. Almost no one needs to make conversions in their daily lives and those that do have charts and calculators.
Life is not a math problem.