Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)

thefabricator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 422 posts

Re: The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)

#311

Post by AngryData »

d--b wrote: post #133
threemux wrote: post #62

I'd part with cups and teaspoons/tablespoons and the like, but you'll pry inches/feet/yards and fahrenheit from my cold, dead hands. They're both more convenient for daily use. I think I'd prefer to keep miles as well but I don't have a good reason for that one. Fahrenheit has more precision without using decimals for the thing 99% of people are using temperature measurements for: air temp. Where I live, we generally…

Can you at least switch to 1/10th of inches? The 1/4th, 1/8th, 1/16th is very annoying

That would be negating 90% of the usefulness of using a fractional system though. It is barely a step up from using a prime number like 7 or 11 as a number base or divisor.

Re: The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)

#312

Post by robocat »

qingcharles wrote: post #202
Symbiote wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Australia switched to 570ml, rounding up. Would that be acceptable?

Do they still call them pints?

Apparently everywhere except South Australia: https://manofmany.com/culture/drinks/beer-glass-sizes-in-aus...

Re: The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)

#313

Post by fragmede »

rconti wrote: post #268
beloch wrote: post #242

To those who cling to customary units because... 1. "They're more intuitive". They're not. You're just familiar with what 70 F feels like. If you're used to metric, 70 F is meaningless, but you intuitively know what 20 C feels like. 2. "Metric leads to lots of awkward numbers." All systems will fortuitously have round numbers in some contexts and awkward numbers in others. Customary units are different in that there…

Counterpoint to #1, celsius increments are too large. I laugh every time I see a thermostat in a car or home that needs to have steps like 20, 20.5, 21, 21.5.. :)

How is that a counterpoint to #1? By that same logic, inches are too big an increment so it's hilarious every time fraction of one is used. 15/16ths? lololol!

Re: The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)

#314

Post by asdff »

psadauskas wrote: post #298
beloch wrote: post #242

To those who cling to customary units because... 1. "They're more intuitive". They're not. You're just familiar with what 70 F feels like. If you're used to metric, 70 F is meaningless, but you intuitively know what 20 C feels like. 2. "Metric leads to lots of awkward numbers." All systems will fortuitously have round numbers in some contexts and awkward numbers in others. Customary units are different in that there…

I read a study many years ago, I haven't been able to find it for awhile. It took people who had grown up using each system, and asked them to estimate things just by guessing. For example, "How long is that wall?" or "How far is it from here to the post office?" or "How heavy is this paperweight?". People who'd grown up using customary were significantly more accurate in their guesses. The study surmised it was beca…

It makes sense. Curling my finger it is pretty much dead on 1 inch from the tip to the first joint. My foot is a little shorter than 1 foot, but in shoes, pacing it out one foot after another, it is nearly dead on as well. A lot of people measure using anatomy with conventional units.

Re: The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)

#315

Post by fragmede »

prmph wrote: post #253
beloch wrote: post #242

To those who cling to customary units because... 1. "They're more intuitive". They're not. You're just familiar with what 70 F feels like. If you're used to metric, 70 F is meaningless, but you intuitively know what 20 C feels like. 2. "Metric leads to lots of awkward numbers." All systems will fortuitously have round numbers in some contexts and awkward numbers in others. Customary units are different in that there…

Yeah, those people should also think about the fact that even the customary units die-hard do not use micro-feet, milli-feet, or nano-feet, etc.

A slightly more esoteric Imperial unit is "mils", for thousandths of an inch. 1 mil = 0.001 inch. Which means 1 mil = 25.4 micrometers if we also want to use a non-traditional meter measurement.

Re: The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)

#316

Post by fragmede »

AngryData wrote: post #308
nine_k wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Customary units" are a varied bunch. The inch-foot-yard-mile scale are not uniform, and not easy to calculate. Their only convenience is easy divisibility by 3. The practical example of uniform scale of this kind is seconds-minutes-hours, which, I suppose, go all the way down to the Sumerian 60-based scale. The mm-cm-m-km are much easier in practice. Sub-inch units are an honest binary system, and as such is pretty…

0F is useful in areas where they salt roads because thats the temperature many salts stop being effective and previously good road might turn to ice sheets. But it isn't a good reason all by itself.

How hard is it to remember -17° C when that's something you grew up with since childhood though? As a trade off, you get 0° C for water freezing and you don't have to remember 32°F for water freezing instead. Or you remember all 4 of those if you leave near a borders.

Re: The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)

#317

Post by estimator7292 »

We're in such a stupid time. I'm an EE, I typically do all my engineering in millimeters, but most of my coworkers prefer the clownshoes unit "mils". Half our soldering irons are set to Fahrenheit, the others Celsius.

In ordinary every day life, I've found that I use metric for measurements under an inch or under an ounce. At a certain upper limit it makes more sense to use metric for large values too.

So I have to suffer with the magic constant 25.4 bouncing around my brain every day forever and constantly converting trivial measurements into worse units.

I will never convert a measurement to fractional inches. If you must have inches as an input you can suffer a damn decimal point.

Re: The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)

#318

Post by AngryData »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #148
mschild wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grocery sizes. In fact, a lot of them already have it on the items. Typically because a lot of products are also sold in Canada so they put the ml measurement next to the gallons.

When I go to buy liquor it seems to already be mostly in metric, sizes are 500ml, 750ml, and liter.

Most all of it is, even from US companies, but customers still often use the imperial shorthands of pints, quarts, fifths, half gallon, and gallon. Everyone I know just doesn't care that it isn't precisely correct, its all relative due to varying alcohol content anyways.

Re: The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)

#319

Post by wffurr »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #301
wffurr wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> But then [post-1970s] some kind of shit seemingly started to poison the country. https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ - the oil ran out and the post-war boom ended.

If you think being tethered to gold was a good thing I wonder if you also believe wealth is a zero-sum proposal? I would think that the explosive growth of wealth since 1971 would cause most to rethink that.

>> If you think being tethered to gold was a good thing

I wouldn't say that. But the memes about 1971 are striking.

>> I wonder if you also believe wealth is a zero-sum proposal

I don't know where that comes from. Pretty clearly it's not. Building stuff that multiplies labor productivity produces more wealth for everyone.

I think the issue in 1971 wasn't the end of the gold standard per se, but the end of the post-war reconstruction boom, the end of cheap oil subsidizing literally everything, and what I didn't mention in my original comment but it also highly relevant is the drastic lowering of top tax rates.

Wealth isn't zero-sum, but dividing up the share of the newly created wealth is. The more of it that goes to capital instead of labor, the more of that share of productivity growth is captured by the rich instead of the workers, who end up not sharing in the broader prosperity of society.

Post reply on HN