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0 pointsAloha2y ago0 comments

Yes hundredweight is an official measurement, but it's not a widely used one (I think it might be used in the sale of nails only?) - which is the parents point. We'd just calculate it in pounds or fractional tons.

You act as if these calculations are simply impossible in customary units, they're not and we do them all the time.

To go on from this, we've converted everything that meaningfully effects our external competitiveness, as I said in a parallel comment I dont think our competitiveness would be helped or harmed if meat was sold in kilograms vs lbs or if we have temperature on the weather forecast in Celsius.

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saalweachter2y ago

Hundredweight show up in agricultural settings -- you'll see the price of pork being $123/hundredweight, instead of $1.23/lb. I assume this is because the price of meats used to be pennies per pound, and people wanted the numbers to be bigger, $12.50/hundredweight instead of $0.125/lb.

usrbinbash2y ago

> You act as if these calculations are simply impossible in customary units, they're not and we do them all the time.

No I don't. I said they are more difficult than they have to be, and for no good reason.

> I dont think our competitiveness would be helped or harmed if meat was sold in kilograms vs lbs

https://gizmodo.com/five-massive-screw-ups-that-wouldnt-have...

Maybe not, but it would probably have helped in not having a 125 million dollar space probe go up in flames.

mulmen2y ago

125 million dollars is precisely nothing in the scheme of interplanetary exploration and we already learned our lesson. I would expect someone so obsessed with radix 10 as yourself to understand orders of magnitude.

In the places it matters the US already uses the metric system. This has been true for more time than Germany has used the metric system.

Since the time the metric system was created a world war was fought, centered around a misguided sense of supremacy. The people with a sense if moderation and the ability to compromise in the face of real constraints won the war. The adherents to strict philosophy were destroyed.

The Mars Climate Orbiter crashed because of a miscommunication. We could have done it all in IS Customary units. Nobody did any calculations in their head. This is a hard task. We learned from that, as we always do. The US has still led the largest presence on Mars. We know what we are doing.

usrbinbash2y ago

> Since the time the metric system was created a world war was fought, centered around a misguided sense of supremacy. The people with a sense if moderation and the ability to compromise in the face of real constraints won the war. The adherents to strict philosophy were destroyed.

Out of the countries that won that war, all but one have either switched to the metric system, or were already using it. So did all the countries who lost that war. In fact, every country other than Myanmar, Liberia, and the US officially uses the metric system.

So what exactly does WWII have to do with using, or not using the metric system, the ability to compromise, or the mathematical, economic, scientific and technical fact that the metric system is more widley accepted, and for good reasons?

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saalweachter2y ago

usrbinbash2y ago

> You act as if these calculations are simply impossible in customary units, they're not and we do them all the time.

No I don't. I said they are more difficult than they have to be, and for no good reason.

> I dont think our competitiveness would be helped or harmed if meat was sold in kilograms vs lbs

https://gizmodo.com/five-massive-screw-ups-that-wouldnt-have...

Maybe not, but it would probably have helped in not having a 125 million dollar space probe go up in flames.

mulmen2y ago

In the places it matters the US already uses the metric system. This has been true for more time than Germany has used the metric system.

usrbinbash2y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse