It’s nice to see larger outlets talking about urbanism topics and Vox has made a few videos in this area recently.

  • yA3xAKQMbq@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    As a European who knows imperial units, it’s not how it works for us, and it’s not the point.

    I can tell you approximately what a litre is the same way you can judge a gallon. By experience. By comparison. You know a “gallon of milk”, I know “a litre of milk”.

    I can tell you what a meter is, but that doesn’t give me the power to tell your height to the centimeter.

    Just today, I had to mop up a water leak. I couldn’t have told you how many litres it was until I had it in the bucket, because it was spread out on the floor.

    The point of the metric system is not that everything is tidy, that a screen is not 38 cm but 40 cm.

    The point is that I can tell you that 10 40cm screens are 4 meters. That a ton of water is 1000 kg, which is a cubic meter, which is 100x100x100 cm.

    The problem with imperial units is not the units themselves, it’s the confusing calculations you have to take because you have a different unit which is 3, 12, 16, etc times the other unit.

    How much is 16 1/3 cubic foot in inches. That is the issue at hand.