The replies are hilarious 
, so many blue checks saying "abandon big tech!" while they pay for Twitter from the richest fascist in the world.
The replies are hilarious , so many blue checks saying "abandon big tech!" while they pay for Twitter from the richest fascist in the world.
Source. Also fuck you this is a stupid statement. Why in the goddamn fuck would a variable unit with multiple "standardisations" almost exclusively based on the whims of contemporary rulers have been determined by artisans, and some specific length that was useful to them? If they're so specifically useful lengths and divisions to work with why are they variably divided into 9, 12, or 16 parts depending on where you are in the world and history, and why does the specifically useful length vary across standardisations? If the standardised size is so valuable to artists then why did it change twice in 200 years because different English kings wanted credit for it? You think their artisan friends were begging them to make the foot a little shorter?
Did you do any thinking at all before writing this? Can you not come up with a single possible reason why it might be advantageous to base measurements off an immutable aspects of the universe instead of "dave reckon's this is a good length*? Is it really that hard to connect a desire for standardisation to something that actually is the same every time?
You seem to be operating under the assumption that the inch, foot, yard etc were pulled arbitrarily out of thin air by a king when he standardized the system. No, the system already existed, and it had been developed organically by working people for thousands of years. All the king did was come in and say "we're going to use this specific version of the system for standard's sake", he didn't make any meaningful changes to the lengths themselves.
You put far too much emphasis on the so-called "immutable aspects of the universe" that metric is supposedly based on. At one point in time the meter was based on a metal rod that they kept in Paris, they only stopped using that because they found that it was slowly shrinking over time. There's no reason that you couldn't determine what fraction of a light-second that a yard is and then retroactively define it as that, and then claim that the imperial system is "based on immutable aspects of the universe". It's all arbitrary at the end of the day.
Ah, not quite - I'm operating on the assumption that the people working for thousands of years arbitrarily pulled them from thin air. Because, you know... That's literally how all definitions of measurement work. Try the cubit, somewhere between a foot and a half and 4 feet - what was so useful to people about those distances? At best ones like the foot and the chi came from using your forearm as a standard length, but once they're standardised the choice of whose forearm to use is completely arbitrary. Russian units were based on different ways of stretching your body parts - stuff like a hand span or arm span. Choosing what to use as a measurement is completely arbitrary, which then is standardised over time by people using the same thing as a measurement and it eventually getting defined as a single distance. The kings arbitrary choices were just building on the arbitrary choices of the past. There wasn't anything less arbitrary about the choice because lots of people used it.
Yes, they discovered the law as they understood it was mistaken, and so found more accurate ways to define it, which is why we're now using a fraction of a light second. If we find more precise definitions in future we'll define it by them.
Lastly, they already did that. The imperial and us customary measurement systems are both defined by metric distances now, specifically because metric distances, equally arbitrarily chosen as they are, shouldn't change. And if they do, we'll find something that doesn't.