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Interesting how the example image for a bad UI shows the good UI using "Metric" vs "English" buttons.

In the England and the rest of the UK we use "Metric" vs "Imperial".

And we use a half metric system; metres and miles, litres and pints.

I notice in the USA the system is a different half metric system. Americans are much more likely to use ounces instead of litres. I also heard they sometimes use "kilopounds" and other such weirdness.

Anyway, this example image is one big fail to me.



Lived in the USA all my life and I have never even heard of "kilopounds"


Maybe they mean to reference the oddities surrounding tons, short tons, tonnes, and metric tons?


kilopounds feels like a weird bastard but I think it makes sense. The actual values of the metric system are just as arbitrary as US Custom/Imperial (a particular mass, 1/10,000,000 part of the quarter of a meridian, such and such hyperfine transitions in a arbitrary atom, &.) The value of the metric system is decimalization -- the centi-, kilo-, mega- prefixes. Really, if americans ditched miles and tonnes and stuck to kilofeet and megapounds the systems would not be meaningfully different.

On the other hand, having your prime factors be 2 and 3 rather than 2 and 5 are nice when you divid things into quarters and thirds regularly (inches).


I've never had my posts downvoted so much as on HN.

I'm more or less on topic. I'm not engaging in a flame war. I'm not trolling.

Is it the "kilopounds" thing? What can I say, I heard that this kind of Greek prefix gets used with non Metric meaurements. So I said sometimes.




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