• Dadifer@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    So, from my perspective, your experience gives me the exact opposite view. The fact is: no one is stopping us. Anyone in American can use metric any time they want. We use Imperial a significant amount of time because it’s useful. Feet and inches are related to body parts. Kilometers are too small for our giant country. I design surgical tools, and I use metric. I design buildings, and I use feet and inches.

    I don’t really think it’s slowing us down to have more than one system.

    • Honytawk@feddit.nl
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      23 hours ago

      Kilometers are too small for our giant country.

      Kilometers aren’t the biggest measurement in metric though.

      It goes: Kilometer x1000= Megameter x1000= Gigameter x1000= Terameter. A Terameter is about 1012 meter

      Just as it goes smaller like: Milimeter /1000= Micrometer /1000= Nanometer /1000= Picometer

      And even those are still not the biggest or smallest measurements possible in metric.

      • Hagdos@lemmy.world
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        50 minutes ago

        That’s true in theory, but if you talk about megameters to a European you’ll get very weird looks.

        An engineer will understand what you mean, but still laugh at you.

        But it’s a non-issue for anything on earth, where you’ll have 40.000 kilometers at most. Not a lot of time is spent talking about x thousand kilometer.

        Any notion that a kilometer is “too small” is laughable.

    • JPSound@lemmy.world
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      16 hours ago

      Lol. Dude, with all due respect, did you skip breakfast or something? First, body parts? Take a drink of water, please. You’re dehydrated. Also, although I agree imperial isn’t completely useless, one of its strengths is not because the size of the contental United States. It’s not like miles and kilometers are orders of magnitude different when measuring an identical distance. Lightyears and astronomical units are terrible units to use to describe a drive from LA to NYC for this reason, but is it really that big if a deal between choosing miles and kilometers? I don’t see it that way.

      The main reason why I use metric with my work is because I commonly deal in millimeters / sub-inches. If I used inches, everything would be shitty fractions and I hate fractions. To me, metric is just cleaner when increasing or decreasing magnitudes. Which I generally stay within cm and mm.

      Within industrial applications, such a building a structure in the US, yeah, it makes sense to stick ti imperial because it is indeed the national unit of measurement. But outside that reason, I don’t find much of a benefit. Coincidentally, I moved off grid 3 weeks ago and am building a cabin way out in the woods. Because its just me and I plan to stay here until my end, I’ll definitely use metric. If I was just developing a place I intended to flip, I’d use Imperial singularly because I’m in the US.

        • JPSound@lemmy.world
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          16 hours ago

          I don’t think you read my response. I wasn’t attacking you at all. I’m not one of those mean shits on here. I certainly meant no aggression.

    • Griffus@lemmy.zip
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      1 day ago

      I don’t really think it’s slowing us down to have more than one system

      Say that to the Mars Climate Orbiter

    • OxiZero@feddit.uk
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      2 days ago

      Kilometers are too small for our giant country.

      Fortunately for NASA, space is actually smaller than the USA. Otherwise km would be totally unworkable.

      I’m guessing that you have to use meters instead of yards when designing tall buildings? Yards would be too small for most skyscrapers.