The biggest source of communication issues around these unit systems is that in metric, you're supposed to reach for decimals when working with the units, and in imperial, you're supposed to reach for fractions when working with the units.
Which is why the imperial lovers all cry out about their fractions not "working" in metric. Yes, exactly, that is the point. They don't understand that they're reaching for a tool they shouldn't be reaching for, and then they blame the unit system for it.
If Fahrenheit is better than Celsius because the units are smaller, doesn't that mean that the kilometre is better than the mile because it has smaller units?
It is all subjective. You like what you grew up with because it is familiar, not because it is better. You know by rote memorisation how much 100 feet is and what 75F feels like, the same way I know by rote memorisation how much 50 meters is and what 25C feels like.
Show me where I have at any time argued one system is better than the other, as opposed to precisely that no system is strictly preferable, and I'll answer this point. Until then I can't and thus also won't.
In the meantime your grasp of nuance or lack thereof is no pressing concern of mine. And my entire thesis has been flagrantly subjective throughout, save where the minor matter of relevant history is involved. To attempt to answer this with the charge of subjectivity, as though to do so accomplished other than to recapitulate what has been obvious all day, seems not only pointless but risible.
Again, this is just familiarity. You think it's super neat that you can divide a cup of whatever by 2 or 3 or 4, but if I tell you to divide it by 5, you're gonna deflect and ask me "who does that?!?"
Imperial works neatly for a small domain of problems, and is useless outside that domain.
Metric is less neat in that small domain, but works equally well everywhere.
Firstly, we can divide a cup by 2, 3, and 4 in the kitchen because those are common measuring-cup sizes. Nobody is prevented from using a fractional size: if I divide a cup by 5 then I have 1/5th of a cup, nothing more and nothing less.
While 1/4th of a cup is 2 oz, and 1/3rd of a cup is 16 teaspoons, 1/5th of a cup doesn't divide evenly into a smaller unit and that's why "we don't do it", but there is nothing to stop the chef from using 9 teaspoons. [Or he can instinctively go up to 45mL on his graduated measuring cup, which almost always has both systems on it!] Teaspoons, tablespoons, ounces, cups, quarts and gallons are all inter-related multiples, and once you internalize it, you can convert like a boss.
While I'm sure it's lovely that metric measures divide by 2 and 5, that's all they divide by, so in terms of divisors, you've lost 3, 4, 6, 8...
So if it really is about dividing things usefully without resorting to fractions, then using a system that is nothing but multiples of 10 is a handicap, when we've had systems with lovely 12s and 16s with many different options for dividing them up.
But the metric people can simply chop up the measures even more finely and claim victory. For example, currency: it was in multiples of 16 or 8 which allowed for limited permutations. Decimalization chopped it into pennies, and we find 100 gradations in every pound sterling. All that did is make base-10 math easier for bean counters, and confuse people on the streets with a mystifying array of coinage. [Mental math indicates that it must increase the volume of coins per average transaction, as well.]
If a basic customary unit of length is an inch, many people can put two fingers together and estimate that on the human scale. But who can estimate or eyeball a millimeter?
Oh, and, have you ever found a nice British recipe in metric, shopped at your American grocery store, and prepared that in your American kitchen with your Fahrenheit range? You will eventually want to tip it all in the rubbish bin. Adam Ragusea suggests as much: https://youtu.be/TE8xg3d8dBg?si=SD8wLxD6ib6InLX4
From an European view who has accustomed to imperial units, these discussions are so tiring. The metric vs imperial debates almost always come down to just personally preferring what you're familiar with. I've had the exact same feelings about imperial units as Americans express of metric. I really don't have a problem estimating what 10 cm or 1 kg or 1 kilometer or 2 degrees of Celsius difference in the weather is.
And the division issue is almost trivial in my view; you can just take 120 cm or 12 gram quantity. You don't magically lose the ability to divide things by other than 10 or 5 or 2 when using metric. Its not like decimal fractions disappear in imperial systems either. The metric system is there for making it easy to scale things between orders of magnitude and have sane conversions between units.
> If a basic customary unit of length is an inch, many people can put two fingers together and estimate that on the human scale. But who can estimate or eyeball a millimeter?
If you'd grown with a metric system you could eyeball a centimeter with ease. Also comparing orders of magnitude different measures for estimation isn't fair, how precise would be your guess of a barleycorn?
Except now you can't divide accurately by 5. Or 10.
You're making an argument from familiarity. Yes, a 12-base system using fractions works very neatly in a small human-sized domain, but it disintegrates into complete uselessness outside that domain. That's why you get ridiculousness as things being 13/64th of an inch, or that there's 63360 inches in a mile. It's unworkable for very large distances and very small distances. With a metre and standard prefixes, you don't need any conversion factors, and you can represent any distance at any scale with a single unit.
> That's why you get ridiculousness as things being 13/64th of an inch
Such fractions are very rarely used, you're more likely to use mils (1/1000 of an inch) at that scale.
> or that there's 63360 inches in a mile.
Likewise, something that will probably never come up in your life. Inches/feet/yards and miles just remain separate things, never mixed.
> With a metre and standard prefixes, you don't need any conversion factors, and you can represent any distance at any scale with a single unit.
There's no intuition for them. Knowing what a meter is does not help with getting a feel for a kilometer. They might as well be as separate as feet and miles at that scale.
> Quick, what's 11/64" + 3/8"?
That one's not even hard, it's just a fraction. 35/64"
> Quick, which weight is bigger: 0.6lbs or 10oz?
Another arbitrary problem that will probably never come up, but to entertain you: since 0.5 lbs is 8oz, adding 1.6oz to that (another tenth of a lbs) results in 9.6oz. 10oz is bigger than 0.6 lbs. Not hard, but at least mildly harder than the first question.
None of this really had to do with the convenience highlighted initially: 12 inches in a foot and 3 feet in a yard make extremely convenient divisible factors. You can trivially divide things by 2, 3, 4, and 6 and keep with whole integer values. The same definitely cannot be said of metric.
Are you purposely doing this? That is obviously not what I meant. Nobody says "3 miles, 500 feet", they say "3.1 miles". Effectively two systems of distance measurement: inches/feet/yards (near scale), and miles (distant scale).
"5 feet 10 inches" is completely normal and fine.
> This requires you to start with 12 inches. If you're making a cupboard to fit in an 18¾" (476mm) space, it's no use, or is only randomly useful.
So you cut the cupboard to fit a 18¾" space, no big deal. Same as anything else, and just as random as 476mm.
Typically they come in (integer!) 12-inch, 24-inch, 36-inch, or 48-inch variants.
They are talking past each other. One is saying, "metric is better than imperial", the other is saying "imperial works". Neither claim is relevant to the other.
Obviously, the base should be the same for units as it is for numbers in general, but there are good arguments in favor of using 12 for both. Then all your examples become as simple as division by 5 is in decimal.
5 and 10 are arbitrary numbers though. Halving and doubling are really the only special operations, and base-8 or base-16 would be superior to 10 or 12 for those.
The topic of this thread is why the base 10 number system is less than optimal, and a different base would be better. Obviously having to convert to other bases when we use a base 10 system normally is inconvenient, but that's not the point.
If you've ever waded into ragebaity online discussions, for example Europeans taunting Americans about the lack of public healthcare or basic worker rights, there will always be a loud contingent of Americans spouting counter-arguments based in American Exceptionalism, claiming that everyone else somehow, magically, has the US to thank for its standard of living.
It was always easy to dismiss those as uninformed morons, but Signalgate showed that at least Vance and Hegseth truly believes it, and who knows how many more of their ilk.
Up until 2016, the US was predominantly governed by people who understood the post-WWII world order, who understood the immense benefit of Pax Americana to the US itself. People who understood soft power and diplomacy, people who understood that although the upfront costs of maintaining the military hegemony, of playing world police, the benefits far outweighed the costs. People who understood mutually beneficial trade agreements, and that a trade deficit is a small price to pay to maintain the USD as the world's reserve currency.
But now, it's the spoiled grandchildren who are in power, who have been brought up suffused with the exceptionalism such that they take America's position for granted in eternity. And they look at the cost of all of these things, how much it directly benefits other countries, and react with stupid short-sighted greed, thinking that getting rid of the "free-loaders" will make them richer.
I remember the TPP trade deal. It took eight years to negotiate and the US strong-armed everyone else into accepting its provisions on IP, which would have allowed the US to maintain its position at the top of the value chain, countering the ascendancy of China.
All gone, in the trash, because the people who are once again in power fundamentally do not understand how it would have strengthened the US. So now we're back to some kind of mercantilistic trade-war, that the US will lose.
>there will always be a loud contingent of Americans spouting counter-arguments based in American Exceptionalism, claiming that everyone else somehow, magically, has the US to thank for its standard of living.
The entire second part of your comment shores up exactly this notion that everyone else has the US to thank for its standard of living and that the country is exceptional.
Underlying all the things you list: the post-WWII order, the Pax Americana, the military hegemony, the position of the dollar as the World's reserve currency and so forth all underscore exactly the fact that the US is or at least has been exceptional and that the rest of the world has been heavily benefited by it.
That some of these people then took this and spun it into idiocy about cutting off "freeloaders" without being aware that this means having to take a hit to the country's exceptional position doesn't change the truth of the U.S being exceptional and many countries having many indirect benefits to thank it for
The post-WWII order was deliberately designed by clever American politicians who realised they could leverage the untouched industrial base and built-up military capability to become a world superpower, in an alliance with Western Europe. All of these policies were and are 100% America First, because the US has always been the primary benefactor of it all, but they've been marketed as some kind of benevolent altruistic goodwill-project that "leader of the free world" simply "has to do" because it's "the right thing".
Bullshit. It's naked greed all the way down. Exceptional? Exceptionally greedy more like it.
Greedy or not, somebody was going to become the dominant and even hegemonic world power after that colossal war and the nation state dynamics that followed it. Would you have preferred that it be something like the then still Stalinist USSR, or later perhaps the deeply authoritarian (and under Mao batshit crazy on its internal policies) China?
Given the inevitable rise of at least one dominant power, I prefer that it was the United States with its generally benevolent democratic traditions to model off of (even if it itself often poorly applied them overseas)
> With fewer students applying, there will be more room there for Americans.
The US has benefitted enormously from being able to brain-drain other countries for their best and brightest. As a country, you are much better off offering the limited amount of spots in higher education to smart and driven students from abroad, than to average Americans.
> suppressors are likely to become legalized here in the coming months.
The fallout of reversing the brain-drain is going to take decades to have an impact, but you don't care, because you're getting your toy now now now.
My understanding is that it's net negative to test too much.
A lot of men die with prostate cancer, because only very few die from it. And if you belong to the former group, knowing about it or doing any kind of intervention means a massive loss in quality of life. So the best course of action overall is to close our eyes and stop looking. And hope you don't belong to the latter group.
It's an indication that something's wrong with the system. We'd get better overall health outcomes if we tested everyone and told a large cohort of people "you do have cancer, and there are these possible treatments for it, but we recommend you don't take any of those treatments and just hope for the best". But between doctors and patients and other healthcare participants, we collectively can't do this - a large minority of people will freak out and demand treatment and the healthcare providers will feel compelled to go along with it.
Perhaps this plan just needs better marketing. Instead of dividing tumors into benign and malignant we could have a third category for malignant but slow-growing.
MRI machines need to be a) democratized so they're cheaper and everywhere and b) connected to trustworthy clinically-proven radiological AI to identify and watch growths. There's absolutely no rational reason any patients should end up with surprise terminal cancers or surprise coronary artery disease.
(Yes, yes whole body scans exist but these are largely pseudo-medical scams that don't deliver what they promise. I'm saying deliver on it, within reason.)
edit: Ah ok. Risk of over-treatment by broad scanning?
"Active surveillance aims to avoid unnecessary treatment of harmless cancers while still providing timely treatment for those who need it." according to NHS.
No, you don't recover. Many men will get prostate cancer when they're old, but they'll most likely die from something else before that one becomes an issue.
But if we do scan and test and screen, a lot of men will find out they have it, become anxious about it and will want to do something about it, which leads to a lot of unnecessary treatments that decreases people's quality of life and wouldn't extend their lifespan anyway.
> > historically we have exactly zero expectation of privacy in public spaces in the UK.
> True, but we also had zero expectation of permanent records being kept of so much of what we do in public spaces, or being under such constant surveillance in public spaces. I think that is a concern.
I've been watching a bunch of "auditor" videos from the UK. These guys are basically trolling by going around with a camera in public, filming stuff, and fishing for reactions that they can then post on Youtube or TikTok or Reels or whatever for views and engagement.
One thing that's very consistent across these videos is how many of their victims truly believe that you need permission to film people in public, or that they can walk up to the guy with the camera and demand to know who he is or that he deletes the footage. So a lot of people are acting as if they had much stronger rights to privacy than they really do, people think they're generally safe from being constantly surveilled, when the opposite is in fact true.
Another thing that's also hilariously consistent is when these auditors film businesses, and representatives of those businesses, usually the store manager, goes out and tells them they can't film the customers going in and out of the store because that's "against company policy" or "because of respect for our customers' privacy". At the same time, those stores have tons of security camera inside the store, recording every little thing every single customer is doing all the time.
The hypocrisy is blatant. Everybody wants to monitor everyone else, but no-one wants to be monitored by anyone.
Which is why the imperial lovers all cry out about their fractions not "working" in metric. Yes, exactly, that is the point. They don't understand that they're reaching for a tool they shouldn't be reaching for, and then they blame the unit system for it.