this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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Strange Planet by Nathan W. Pyle
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Which is exactly how everyone, everywhere, uses measurement systems.
As I said elsewhere nobody's running around "quick, what's 1/5th of a mile?!?" We tend to go down to the quarter mile then just jump to yards. Then down to feet. It's absolutely equivalent to going from kilometers to meters to centimeters in terms of usage.
Like, has anyone ever really said "we're 153,267 centimeters from home?"
Well no, same as no one says '476.46 inches from the bin'. Cm work fine up to 100, then you talk m, then km. 'About two foot' and 'about sixty cm' are just as easy to say, you're just not used to the terminology
You think it is all convenient and easy to use intuitively, until i ask you, to convert how much water you use a day to how much water you use in a year and how much water your city uses.
Because your city measures in acre foot, which is 43,560 cubic feet or 325,850 US gallons. Actually there is a weird 3/7 of a gallon left
So you have no way of relating the ~20-40 gallons of water you use per day to the water use in your city ir the water you use in a year that is measured in centi-cubic-feet without pulling out a table and calculator.
Meanwhile i know that i use about 120 liters of water, which is 0.120 m3 a day. So my water bill in m3 is just a thousand liters per m3 and my city uses 230 million m3 a year or about 630.000 m3 a day. With that i can easily estimate that i use about 1/5.000.000 of my citys water.
So when we are talking about drought issues, or water demand etc. i can understand the values in the scientific and political debate, because i can actually relate them to my personal life.
The metric system empowers people because it makes SI units in any domain and of any size relateable and accessible. Meanwhile a kid in the US doesn't know what a mile is until it learns that by being driven enough miles to get a feel for how many yards that is.
Yeah, no. Knowing a different measuring system isn't gonna make me suddenly want to know the nitty-gritty details of things. The way water volume/use is measured in the US has nothing to do with how much people understand their water bill. If I really wanted to I'd just find something online to help me convert. Which I'd probably do on the other system because that's just reality. You know those things because you care about them or were interested not because you use what you consider to be a superior system of measurement lol. You guys really try hard to make it seem like a way bigger deal than it is.
of course you are free to be interested or not. But given the necessities of the transofrmation in energy, water, land use, transportation etc. i find it crucial to be able to relate to the political discussion to make an informed choice. I know most people aren't interested. But given that we are in a technological society we cannot afford not to relate to these things.
I fully understand roughly what 1/5 of a mile would be without any effort. That sounds perfectly reasonable and recognizable for me and I doubt I'm alone. It's because it's the system I use. Yours works for you because you're familiar with it. That's all there is to it.