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Americans will measure with anything except the metric system.
it's ironic because as a little kid in the US in the late 1970s we all learned the metric system, but we see the "imperial" system everywhere still....like the conversion just never got around to happening. it's confusing.
F-22 entered service 2005 Air to air kills since entered service: 2005-2022: 0 2023: 2
Given the Chinese have been complaining to the UN for the last year about American Low Earth Orbit satellites spying on them (Starshield, Space Development Agency, etc..) this balloon thing is pretty clever.
I don't see an equivalency. Low Earth Orbit satellites are above the ionosphere, balloons below. I suspect if it is radio traffic that you are interested in listening in on then one of those is much more effective.
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Funny story: I was in Spain several years ago and was talking to a guy I met about sailboats. I mentioned I had a boat, and he asked how big. I thought for a second and said "7 meters" so as not to be an ignorant American. He thought for a second and said "huh, 21 feet".
I'm not sure what the situation is in other European countries, but in the UK we use different units depending on the use so most people are use to working with both imperial and metric. Perhaps with the exception of fahrenheit most people here will know what you mean if you use units like feet and will often even prefer thinking in feet over metres for certain things. Personally I default to feet for something like…
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A "sidewinder missile + F-22 flight time costs" are a rounding error in the national security budget. The experience and lessons learnt from using it are valuable to all layers of the military and administration, significantly more so than the financial cost. (I'm British and so not a US tax payer, just a spectator, but would argue the same here)
the problem is as long as the target you send up are cheaper for you to produce than the countermeasure used against them you can spam your opponent and bleed them financially while having a minimal impact on your own budget. Air to air missiles cost on the order of $300,000.00 weather balloons cost and order of magnitude less.
from linked article https://apnews.com/article/politics-united-states-government...
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Except it’s closer to 23 feet right?
If you carry a calculator in your pocket, but if you're just casually converting, 3 feet per meter is pretty good. 100 square meters is about 1000 square feet as well. Not legal for tax purposes, but good enough to understand how big a place is.
If it's a balloon why waste an AIM-9X when the F-22's cannon will get the job done?
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I agree that most people will decide that Olympic sized pools must be big but it doesn't give a layman any clue to just how large a volume they contain in some contexts where you find the comparison used. For example, I made a comment about a similar comparison in a post here on HN a while ago because their example was simply ridiculous [0]. The author in that article referenced the volume of a large body of water as…
The funny thing about Olympic-sized swimming pools is that they are so big that they are nearly useless except for the relatively rare elite swimming competition. So they are actually far more uncommon than you might expect, and are usually built with configurable “walls” so that they can be made smaller for everyday use!
The local 50 meter pool here is always filled with people young and old (and on no way elite) that just swim. You don’t need to be very fit to be able to swim 50 meters without a break.
It‘s a different kind of swimming compared to just hanging around and having fun, sure, but it always seems to be quite in demand when I see pools like that.
(The swimming complex close to me has two Olympic size swimming pools and one of those is open to the public, the other is used by actual elite athletes but also kids who are learning to swim. There is also a small 12.5 meter pool with adjustable depth to learn swimming and for aqua fitness courses.)