Another reason to keep fighting

    • _else [she/her,they/them]
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      4 years ago

      maybe, but there are engineers and scientists who are marxist, and in the built world, i have trouble eyeballing what a 'cup' is; all my cups are bigger than a cup. which is fucking insane. and I'm from the empire. a litre is far closer to something I would actually use-to drink from, to bottle, etc. 250 ml rice (uncooked) is a nice single serving.

      plus, when you're designing on the nanometre scale, there's no god damn intuition involved.

      automation is something marx predicted, and he said it would create the conditions under which liberation would be possible, if I remember right-it's been quite a while since I read his stuff.

        • _else [she/her,they/them]
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          4 years ago

          wow that's so much easier, thank god no contortions are necessary like in metric.

            • _else [she/her,they/them]
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              4 years ago

              okay but when I hear 'cup' I think 'cup'. like the thing I drink from. which is totally different than a measurement of a 'cup'. it might make more sense if I didn't speak english.

        • kilternkafuffle [any]
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          4 years ago

          I have read some places in Southeast Asia defined distances in multiples of the time it takes to cook a pot of rice

          But everyone uses ricecookers now? Or stoves that dramatically change cooking times. Some concepts are just dead.

    • skeletorsass [she/her]
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      4 years ago

      The Imperial measurement system is called that for a reason though. It was first to be forced upon the peoples of the British empire, and in China there were attempts to push out the native measurement system in favor of it. It itself steamrolled a bunch of other seemingly "natural" units, and ended up coerced into wider use across the world as a direct result of British and American imperialism.

        • skeletorsass [she/her]
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          4 years ago

          and which one is a quaint and charming relic of a bygone age.

          The US is still a global hegemon... We still all have to deal with your measurement system regardless of whether we actually use it ourselves, and it is not quaint to us. We also have a few market units still in use, but most units fell out of use without any need of force because there are real practical advantages to metric units. Many of these are rural situations, but urban workers do not feel the same benefits from these units. Others like grocery weights have stuck around and been rounded to close metric values for easy conversion.