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(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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Strange Planet by Nathan W. Pyle
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I feel like a lot of this is based on what you grew up with and you eventually related it to something to make it easier for you.
Like a cm is the width of a fingernail. A dm(10cm) is the size of a middle finger. 100m is 1 minute of walking. I know 1 metre is my normal stride.
Is it too hot? 30s. Is it cold? Less than 10. Is there snow? Less than 0. Is it cool enough to fully dress but not too cold? Around 20.
Big person? 100kg. Small person? 50kg.
The point is that you can make any system relatable.
Oh it's absolutely just based on where you grew up. And there's nothing wrong with that. Everyone uses a rather stupid time system compared to metric measurements, but we stick with it because that's what everyone is used to.
Of course you're right. The point isn't that one is better than another, the point is that Imperial was historically easy to share and use. There's a sense among metric users that the imperial system is stupid, illogical, unwieldy, and useless (see the comic and almost every comment in the thread). None of those things are true, and the advantages of the metric system hardly ever come up for most people.
It's easy to hur dur Americans stupid, but the reality is always more complex.
To be fair, if it truly were more convenient, countries like Japan, China, India or the Middle East that had no cultural reason to prefer one over the other, wouldn’t have chosen metric.
I don’t think Americans are either stupid or more inefficient for having the clearly more impractical system, but I can’t help feel that the only reason they’ve kept their very odd measuring system is that they will never recognize anything ever being better in other countries than it is in theirs.
In a way, the imperial stubbornness among Americans feels like yet another display of American exceptionalism and their odd superiority complex, than anything logical or even pragmatic.