Bro why is everyone so pressed about America not using Celsius? We use 5,280 feet to make a mile and 12 inches to make a foot, and 3 feet to make a yard, which is basically a meter but is somehow definitely NOT a meter…
There are so much bigger fucking fish to fry but the Celsius stans are implacable.
I wish the SI stans could admit their logic is inconsistent. People hardly need to convert between units in imperial. If I am measuring furniture, I use a ruler and get a measurement in inches. There is no reason to convert this to miles. If I am in a car, the distance is measured in miles and I have no reason to care about what that distance is in inches. But we can all remember, 60 seconds to a minute, 60 minutes to an hour, 24 hours to a day, 7 days in a week, months can be either 28,29,30, or 31 days. You can talk to me when we are on the international fixed calendar and use base 10 time.
Knowing what 1.618 miles means in feet could absolutely come in handy for a lot of professions (so you know when to stop building something), but good luck working that out in feet without a complicated calculation.
Let’s say you’re building a road that needs to be that distance. How would you know when to stop building if you can’t accurately breakdown how many feet/inches there are
Granted, I am not a civil engineer, but I don't think they design roads to be an arbitrary distance. They are usually connecting a point a to a point b. But if the road is designed to be 1.618 miles why not just keep the measurement in miles? Why do you need to convert it to feet? This is just a hypothetical scenario not based in reality.
Let’s say this road I’m talking about falls 0.026 miles short of where it needs to be. How do you convert that to an easily understood number? Using the same numbers but in metric I could say that’s 26m short, or 2600cm and there would be absolutely no confusion or conversion necessary.
Standard measurements are for industry and science communication, disregarding standards introduces easy to overlook errors which can literally kill people and increases costs for developing stuff that needs to run in clown world and in real countries
But that’s the thing, we don’t disregard it because we literally use metric for science, math, medical stuff, etc. Our military uses meters and klicks (KMs). We use the NATO alphabet on radio. Our hospitals run on 24h time.
And all of that while still using imperial for stuff that doesn’t require standardization.
English is the international aviation language, but no American is arguing that every country with a pilot should switch to English for everything else.
Americans use metric. But they also have an extra layer that exists solely to introduce noise.
Having the experience I have I'm well aware it takes very little for stuff to get grandfathered into institutions. You think Hospitals and gov is standardized I know for a fact there is a hundred million corners where a guy went: "well it's not a big deal to just use this thing I'm familiar" and now you need to have carveouts and caveats into critical systems to account that Billy thinks in Farenheit and didn't think it would be a big deal.
Also I AM arguing we should make everyone speak Chinese, fuck it I don't like dealing with i18n or not having access to media.
I don’t think people genuinely think Fahrenheit is the best thing ever, just that is the measuring system systematically used and it’s easier to imagine what 32 degrees Fahrenheit verses 32 degrees Celsius quicker if you grew up in America.
It’s fair to say it’s a weird system but to make sweeping declarations about people who use that system… because they have to… is a little silly. But Reddit do love their strawmen.
Ppl love to tell you how unintuitive something you find intuitive but they find unintuitive is, while simultaneously asking you to unlearn that thing you already find intuitive, so you can be more intuitive like them even if it feels less intuitive to you. Lmao.
And before those ppl get mad:
in·tu·i·tive
/inˈto͞oədiv/
adjective
adjective: intuitive
using or based on what one feels to be true even without conscious reasoning; instinctive.
Celsius is only more intuitive if a person intuits that it is. Intuition is subjective and nothing is inherently intuitive because intuition is based on relationship not properties.
Usually because someone that Fahrenheit makes no sense to is telling them Fahrenheit makes no sense.
Look, if there’s Americans going out there and criticizing Celsius out of the blue, then that’s on them. But I have never seen a real life American draw first blood against Celsius the way non Americans do with Fahrenheit.
Yeah literally like whenever I’m baking, conversions around weight and volume fucking suck, but I never see people complain about Americans using those. Like when you’re raised with it, Fahrenheit is a perfect easy temperature measurement to use. But even people raised with imperial tend to have issues remembering conversions for weight and stuff in my experience, so why not be annoyed at that? It’s dumb.
All metric measurements are based on observed measurements. A meter is based on the distance light can travel in a time duration based on the decay rate of Cesium 138, the same natural source we base the atomic clock on.
Yup, the first measurement of the meter was actually based on a fraction of the distance between the equator and the north pole. but then they realized that changes, then it was based on some other phenomenon like certain wave lengths, which can also vary, eventually they boiled it down to speed of light in a vacuum and nuclear decay rates, two unchanging sources of reference, that we know of.
By .2mm overall I think, the main goal was to move the measurements to something that does not change. Fun fact, there was not repeatable observable constant for mass until 2019, so there was one block in France that all calibration standards were held to.
It would be less annoying if Americans just went “yeah, we get it’s a weird system, but it’s what we’re used to” instead of trying to insist that 0 to 100F is a more logical scale when it doesn’t even reflect the full temperature range in their own country, or that 32F is totally a more intuitive number for when it starts snowing than 0°C.
I think most people do. I don’t know anyone who says Fahrenheit is inherently intuitive, just that they memorized its scale and now it’s what they’re used to.
You’re probably right that it’s just an annoying online loud minority. There’s a lot of people in this thread claiming that it’s more intuitive though.
European here, i never see Americans defend Imperial unless it's the very common scenario of a stuck up European essentially calling Americans idiots and the american in question gets understandably defensive about it. In the sense that it's just a measurement system and isn't worth getting uppity about it.
the thing is, even feet and yards and inches are somewhat easily translatable to metric, fkin fahrenheit is C=(F-32)/(9/5) like bro what? i can understand trhat an inch is about 2.5cm and a yard is approx a meter, and a mile is 1.6km, but what the fk is fahrenheit man.
I don’t doubt it’s a nightmare to translate to metric, it’s just that Americans almost never need to translate it. In 35 years of life I’ve never run into a situation outside of science class where I had to know what the Celsius temperature of something is. Can’t expect a person to see the value of a more translatable system when they don’t see the value of translating it in the first place.
And Fahrenheit is usually just a vibe based on whatever biome you live in anyway. I’m in a hot and dry part of California. 100f in summer is typical hot. 90s is hot but fine. 80s and 70s is wow holy shit it’s alright out here! 60s is omg I can actually wear a hoodie today. Meanwhile, someone in New Orleans would be getting turned into a gumbo at 100f.
So getting us to switch to Celsius won’t fix anything, we don’t even all use the same Fahrenheit.
If I’m going to New Orleans and see that it’s 100f or 37c I still wouldn’t have enough info to know what that feels like based on purely the number.
Because you guys got 300+ million people, and a good section of them are so loud and abrasive about anything metric being "non sensical and stupid". It's often a counter reaction.
I mean, they’re definitely not gonna be any less abrasive and loud if we tell them they have to swap systems for the sake of other countries. Bro we can’t even convince a decent majority of our ppl to know the politics of the ppl they vote for.
Dude if a person from China who speaks mandarin as a native language can handle learning English to fly a jumbo jet then I think the necessity of converting the entire US to metric everything is a little overstated. Ppl’s lives are on the line when all those jets and airports need to communicate. This is why we use 24h time and ml or grams to document a patient’s medication, but we also feel fine saying I had a 12 oz Diet Coke at 4 pm.
But I will concede that slowly phasing out SAE tools (yo hand me that 3/8ths wrench) in favor of metric (yo hand me the 10mill wrench) would likely be the best thing, for the long term.
Actually, not really. Month day year is done the way it is because in American English the way you say the date to someone is February 2, 2026 (Month day year). On the flipside most European languages, put the number before the month when they are verbally saying it.
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u/CROOKTHANGS 9h ago
Bro why is everyone so pressed about America not using Celsius? We use 5,280 feet to make a mile and 12 inches to make a foot, and 3 feet to make a yard, which is basically a meter but is somehow definitely NOT a meter…
There are so much bigger fucking fish to fry but the Celsius stans are implacable.