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comment_2908234

And this just demonstrated why the rest of the world gets pissed off constantly having to convert simple straightforward measurements into ungainly inconsistent numbers just to please a bunch of archaic Americans. :rolleyes:

 

BTW the US military has been calling a kilometer a "klick" for decades. Just substitute that for a mile, and if you think a thousand klicks is too short compared to a thousand miles, try walking it.

comment_2908243
47 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:

BTW the US military has been calling a kilometer a "klick" for decades.

 

At least six decades; I remember hearing the term when I lived among the US forces in West Berlin back in the early 1960s.  Kilometers have never bothered me, probably from six years of living in Europe.  DItto liters and kilograms.  However, I am equally inept at thinking in acres and hectares, because I have never had cause to think about measured land areas in either set of units.

 

Driving up in British Columbia last September, before we figured out how to flip the indicators on the display of the new-to-us car from English to metric units and back, I was having to do km-to-miles conversions in my head for estimating driving times (the speedometer has both mph and km/hr on it full time, so staying in compliance with speed limits was not a problem).  That's harder than conversion going the other way.

comment_2908341
21 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

And this just demonstrated why the rest of the world gets pissed off constantly having to convert simple straightforward measurements into ungainly inconsistent numbers just to please a bunch of archaic Americans. :rolleyes:

 

 

 

 

For the love of little dishes, _stop doing that! _.  All of you!  Every one of you! 

 

Stop doing it in trade, in split signs, in casual conversation, in _anything_! 

 

You want us to catch up?  _Make_ us! 

 

In all the history of humanity, no one has ever changed a behavior by pandering specifically to the undesirable behavior.  It drives me crazy! 

 

You have seen our politicians, our actors, our celebrities, and our Uber-wealthy ruling class.  What else do you need to make you understand that you are dealing with children?!  When you want a child to change his behavior, step one is to make it extremely difficult to continue the undesired behavior, is it not? 

 

So please: either decide to give us no choice (and I would like to convert myself; I get super-tired of doing conversions on the fly all day long), or stop blaming us exclusively for something you are deeply complicit in reinforcing. 

 

Mostly, I want to see us adopt liters per hundred kilometers as the metric for fuel consumption, because a consumption difference of 2 mpg "doesn't seem like _that_ much...." and we crank out another four thousand coal burners.... 

 

 

comment_2908345
1 hour ago, Duke Bushido said:

 

 

For the love of little dishes, _stop doing that! _.  All of you!  Every one of you! 

 

Stop doing it in trade, in split signs, in casual conversation, in _anything_! 

 

You want us to catch up?  _Make_ us! 

 

In all the history of humanity, no one has ever changed a behavior by pandering specifically to the undesirable behavior.  It drives me crazy! 

 

You have seen our politicians, our actors, our celebrities, and our Uber-wealthy ruling class.  What else do you need to make you understand that you are dealing with children?!  When you want a child to change his behavior, step one is to make it extremely difficult to continue the undesired behavior, is it not? 

 

So please: either decide to give us no choice (and I would like to convert myself; I get super-tired of doing conversions on the fly all day long), or stop blaming us exclusively for something you are deeply complicit in reinforcing. 

 

Mostly, I want to see us adopt liters per hundred kilometers as the metric for fuel consumption, because a consumption difference of 2 mpg "doesn't seem like _that_ much...." and we crank out another four thousand coal burners.... 

 

 

 

Those children control the world's biggest economy, the world's most powerful military, and more nuclear warheads than the rest of the planet combined. How would you recommend that we make you change?

 

(I'm not unsympathetic to your rant, Duke. I was mainly responding to the satirical but still rather smug tone of the Tumblr thread that Logan posted.)

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