Metric system is meant for clever people.
this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
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Not really, the system itself is clever but it's made for everyone, very simple to use.
If they bother to understand it that is. Base 10 is so simple for metric don't know why we haven't adopted it everywhere, I say that knowing weight in pounds and height in feet / inches, cause who wants to convert everything? But still, would have been better to understand that way from school teachings and used Canada wide.
The system is made for those who create and those who don't know which way to hold an hammer. and it works, that's the beauty of it.
Imperial is just made for peasants in 870s and people who are on still on that level of education.
Can we also double down on getting information only from Canadian Owned and Operated media?
The linked article is from the CBC...
The post title is: "Time to double down on the metric system".
At the same time, I also think it's a good idea to:
double down on getting information only from Canadian Owned and Operated media
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I'm 178cm and 65kg
Fuck you trump
Fun fact, you are exactly 10 bananas tall...
http://bananaforscale.info/#!/convert/length/10/bananas/centimeters
Coming from the USA, yeah fuck the orange shitstain and his oligarch cronies.
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Congrats on the healthy BMI, and on using the correct scale!
By my book, you're now an EU citizen.
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Let's finally move to the ISO 216 standard for paper!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_216
I was a little confused by the paper sizes when I moved to Japan, but it makes so much sense. I love it now.
Oh please, yes!
When I moved to Mexico I was always annoyed with the weird ass paper formats, then when I moved to Canada I had hoped that over here they would have sane formats but alas...
Seriously, the entire world got upgrade after upgrade everywhere and the US constantly was like "nope, we will keep our feet and miles and inches because those "make sense" keeping a large part of developed nations in the dark ages
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When someone asks your height, you answer in centimeters.
Honestly it's just easier for me anyway, because I'm like a quarter short of an inch. If I round down people get confused since they're used to the numbers being padded on top of everything, and if I round up I'm padding the numbers myself.
I mean, I can without hesitating. We all should be able to.
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I went to the states a couple years back. Went to a tavern and was deciding on a beer. Bartender overhears I'm Canadian and tells me the size of the pints in decilitres π
For what it's worth, I'm pretty comfortable with FL oz from reading soda cans and stuff. I just find it crazy how unintuitive metric is to some.
I appreciated his effort, I just thought it was funny
That's just ridiculous. The pint is a measurement unit in itself. The fact that the bartender didn't seem to be aware of that fact is a failure of the imperial system in itself, though not really a surprise since the system relies entirely on memorizing arbitrary values that have no connection with other units.
Though admittedly, the US pint is smaller than the British pint, so there is justification of pointing that out.
A pint in the U.S. is 16oz. What's a British pint?
For us it is 2 cups in a pint 2 pints in a quart 4 quarts in a gallon. (People seem to struggle with remembering that until you tell them quart as in quarter, or 4 in a dollar etc)
Weights are fucked, but I usually just remember 16oz is a pound. Only drug users and chemists remember 28 grams in an ounce. So an 8 ball (1/8th is 3.5 grams). And depending on where you are ranges from 110-240 dollars. So you go to the store and buy a bottle of liquor (sold in metric units, and the store owner will stupidly call it a half gallon) but it's 1.75L, 1L or 750ml for $20-30. And you'll pass out 2 days later super dehydrated upset you wasted all your money.
Dunno in oz, but a US pint is 473mL, and a British pint is 568mL. Quite the difference TBH, and a bunch of bars in Vancouver got fined a few years ago due to shorting customers not providing a full pint when selling them. Some of them were even forced to buy new glasses because they weren't big enough to fit a full pint.
This is a reoccurring problem with the imperial system, since the units just turns into words and no longer hold their meaning as measurements because they're so arbitrary in the first place and are next to impossible to convert on the fly. Like a span is the width of a hand, but that's useless when the difference in size is easily 50% to double just comparing between women and men. Or how you need to specify fluid or dry ounces, yet people often don't bother and just confuse each other by not specifying. Or how complicated conversions and comparisons are to the degree that most people don't do them in imperial and just force themselves to memorize what each arbitrary unit is in a vacuum.
28g to an ounce is a good thing for homebrewers to know, too! I measure hops in grams, and recipes are often given in ounces.
Recipes are just food chemistry i suppose.
Touche
Decilitre is actually the common unit for drinks in Hungary (and possibly in other countries). Hungarians also use dekagramm, which is 10 grams. But the cool thing about metric is that to convert, you just move the decimal around!
A lot of my European beer glasses have dL on them. Offhand I can think of duchesse (Belgium), and Delirium Tremens (also Belgium). Okay, maybe it's just beers from Belgium, I'd have to take a look.
"I'd have to take a look."
Sounds like you have booked a special evening in the pub: "Can I try the next beer please?"
Haha. It's for purely scientific research.
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Can we get the UK on board with this as well? (Maybe when they rejoin the EU? And let's drive on the same site of the road as 98% of the planet while we're on it).
Other than miles most of our stuff is metric anyway, at least legally. Like yeah, we use stones and feet for 'human' measurements in speech etc but if you go to the doctors it would be in kilos and metres. There are a few oddities like milk bottles being in pints and beer in pubs but even then you find things like plant milks and bottles/canned beer in litres. The one that really makes no sense is car fuel efficiency. We sell fuel by the litre but measure it in miles per (imperial) gallon - so it doesnt even tie up with American figures.
Let's move to metric time!
1000 milliseconds in a second
100 seconds in a minute
100 minutes in an hour
100 hours in a day
100 days in a month
100 months in a year.
We'd be so young!
[EDIT] Guys, I thought it was obvious I was saying this in jest... My b
Starting from 1 year being 365 days
1 month would be the equivalent of 3.65 days
1 day would be 52.5 minutes
1 hour would be 31.5 seconds
1 minute would be 0.3 seconds
1 second would be 3 milliseconds
1 millisecond would be 3 nanoseconds
[French revolution intensifies]
Unfortunately with dates you also want to incorporate the natural cycles of the earth and sun, which not only aren't decimal but usually incommensurable, so it's a hard thing to do. The French just had a block of their calendar that didn't count as "real" days IIRC.
If we start seriously going to space, doing everything by Unix epoch (count of seconds since the 60's ended) would make sense, and planning your day might well go by kiloseconds. Someone on here suggested giving up on standardised time zones and just doing everything long-distance that way even on Earth, which grew on me as an idea.
Oh man, you just reminded me of the incoming Epochalypse... A tangent to what you're talking about but something that I feel isn't being taken seriously enough.
I suppose we still have just over 13.5 years, but we have so much more computerized stuff now than we did in the 90s, and how many things do we own with clocks that can't be updated? Interesting times ahead.
Indeed. 64-bit Linux always used 64-bit times, but 32-bit was only updated to it in 2020, and who knows what baremetal embedded systems are doing. A lot of stuff is going to reach EOL by 2038 anyway, but I'm sure there will be people freaking out because their shitty old oven won't turn on, or even their furnace! Anything that's actually professionally maintained will be easier.
One day is a Dec, 10 Decs in a Wec, 10 Wecs in a Mec and 100 Mecs in a Yec. Your days are split into Ceti-decs and Micro-decs!
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