Decimalization is a plague wrought upon our society by bourgeois liberals, while traditional units of measurement were refined over thousands of years by the proletariat through practical use to be applicable to the real world.
Consider money. You have a mutual aid program with one thousand dollars that it needs to give to three equally-needy people. How the fuck are you going to give each of them $333.33 repeating money? Absolute bullshit.
The old money system was far more rational. Two-hundred forty pennies to a dollar was a pretty common way to break it up. That breakup allowed each dollar to be split evenly among 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 24, 30, 40, 48, 60, 80, 120, and 240 of your fellow workers. Compare that to the modern, decimalized dollar, which can only be split evenly between 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, 50, and 100 of your fellow proletarians.
It's not just money that suffers from decimalization though, it's damn-near everything. What the fuck is 30 centimeters? Oh, it's about as long as a foot. Why not just use a foot? Do you know how long a foot is? It's about as long as A FUCKING FOOT! HOW MUCH IS 235 MILLILITERS? IT'S ABOUT AS LARGE AS A CUP! ISN'T OUR SYSTEM IS SO MUCH MORE LOGICAL THAN THE OLD SYSTEM OF A CUP BEING ABOUT AS LARGE AS A CUP!
You might be thinking "oh you're just a dumb provincial American, get used to the metric system and it isn't so bad." Motherfucker the beautiful thing about the old measurement system is that you never have to "get used" to fucking anything, because the measurements are based on practical shit. The only practical measurement in the whole fucking metric system is the liter, and that's because they made it almost indistinguishable from a quart.
BuT hOw MaNy QuArTs ArE iN a GaLlOn? Listen here you common core chucklefuck. Saying that it's easier to remember metric because it's all in tens or hundreds or whatever is just pasting a bandaid over the problem, which is that our education system has had all practical skills systematically rooted out of it. I remember taking Home Ec when I was in middle school and I damn well learned what all of the common measurements were by applying them to real life shit. This metric bullshit is designed to be easier to memorize when you read about it in a textbook.
Who would design this disaster? The French took a break from their rampant Islamophobia and Antisemitism to create this bullshit. But it wasn't the French people, who continued to use traditional units of measure until the new systems were forced upon them, it was the post-revolutionary Bourgeoisie, who had never cut wood or measured flour in their fucking lives, who said "hon hon, let us introduce a new measurement system, oi oi" and infected the world with this plague.
Metric is idealistic nonsense imposed by rich assholes that is increasingly being favored over the materialist, proletarian traditional measurements. The only reason it has any continuing cultural purchase at all is because PMC dipshits like to lord how much smarter they are over everyone. Look inside yourself and destroy any vestige of a hold the metric system has on you, just as through self reflection you should seek to destroy all other forms of liberalism.
When I say that I hate reactionary imperialists, half this site thinks I'm talking about Democrats.
But no.
I am talking about scum like you.
Imagine using a system of length defined by the haphazard pace of an imperialist Roman human male soldier and not the glorious spectacle of light traveling through a vacuum. :pog-dolphin: Disgusting.
Traditional measurements are the indigenous measurements, forged over thousands of years by proletarians of every country. Metric is a settler-colonial system that has been imposed on your mind by wh*te people.
let's bake, I found this nice recipe
oh, it's am*rican.. oh well, i'm sure we can make sense of it anyway
five cups of flour? i have a few different sized cups, but as long as we stick to one size of cup we'll be alright
three-quarters cup of sugar? uh, alright i'll try
nine and 1/4th ounces (about three sticks) of non-dairy butter? well i don't know how much a stick is but 1/8th ounce is about 3.5 grams so let's work this out
two and 3/8ths fluid ounces of soy milk? well water has a specific weight that i can remember, we can do the math, we can do it
two thimbles of baking powder? ...
three and 1/4th smatterings of salt (about seven standard dashes)
bake at 462 degrees fantomas (about four and 3/4 georgian summer days) for six temporal ounces (about four and a half whiles)
:amerikkka:
eh, metric is obviously imperialist, but base-10 itself is extremely common and it's literally because people count their fingers
Ah yes, that unit that is 1/40,075,000 of the Earth's circumference, and 1/299,752,458 of the distance light travela in a vacuum in a second.
So close, so maddeningly close.
How long is this? Just measure it with your feet! Hold on, you have size 7 feet? Better get someone else with a standard-sized foot!
Most Illogical thing I've read today. Excellent Post.
Illogical
It's the metric system that is illogical. Kill the liberal in your head.
Ok, if this doesn't make you at least like the metric system a bit more, nothing will and you can completely free your mind of it.
How much is one milliliter? One cubic centimeter. Useful enough.
What's the mass of 1 mL of water (at standard temperature and pressure)? One gram. And water's density is therefore 1 g/cm^3.
A liter of water is therefore one kilogram. Since most liquids we use are mostly water-based that gives you a good way to visualize and compare volume and mass on the fly.
You can't do that shit with imperial units. Oh, but it pretends it can with its silly ounces and fluid ounces, but guess what? Water is 0.96 oz/fl oz. Not good enough! It is clear what the intention was but the mistakes are clearly baked into the system.
Other than that, you're stuck with metric since imperial units are defined by metric, since metric is defined entirely by universal constants. Until last year kilograms were defined by a bourgeois hunk of iridium and platinum somewhere, but we defined kilogram by a universal constant now.
Go metric and stop whining, Metric is also used in practical shit. You learn how long something is, or how heavy 2 kgs are, but that shit just takes the same effort (or less!) than imperial units.
Oliver Smoot was selected because he was the pledge deemed shortest and "most scientifically named." :michael-laugh:
Fuck off I'm actually an inch shorter. I will never be taller than anyone
When you think about it, units of measurement are pernicious and harmful bullshit which never should've been invented and any proper communist movement should seek to abolish them. Like, the act of measurement itself is an inherent problem. It is the transformation of the subjective into the objective, and that's a path with horrible results we should avoid. Lengths of time, temperature, distance, volume, etc, all of these are subjective experiences, not objective things which can be reduced to objective measures.
I thought the title was Decriminalization is a Plague and I was super confused
If it’s so proletarian, how come it’s called “Imperial” measurement.
The Ukrainian farmers had grain and flour
Stalin waltz's in, asks for some flour
"Fine" said the Ukrainian farmer, "but just a cup"
And out pulleth Stalin a comedically large cup.
Op you do realize that my foot isn't the same size as your foot, and people need to do maths with this kind of shit right. Try to do scientific experimentation in "grains" and "stones" and see where you end up.
I'm not saying that standardization is bad, but the move away from practical measurements that relate to the real world to ones that are completely alienated from it is definitely bad.
"relate to the real world" mate I've yet to understand how it's superior or simpler to use shit like "chains", "rods", "roods". "gills" and "drachm" especially since you still need to stick fractions over that shit for it to have any sense of precision.
No, but you have 12 joints on each hand. So you can count to 144 instead of ten when you're living in the pure and blessed land of duodecimality.
Let the record state I've been truly owned on this date, the 28th Ventôse, 229
Base 12 is bourgeois decadence and inefficiency. The working class base 2 can count to 1024 on our fingers alone
Oh yeah. My bad - you have 12 joints on the non-thumb fingers, so you can keep count with the thumb on those.
Ten is only divisible by one, two, five and ten. Twelve is divisible by one, two, three, four, six, and twelve, so it's easier to handle mentally and learn and easier for practical tasks since there are more whole divisors. There's a reason counting and measuring systems back to the dawn of writing were some sort of base 12 or could be reduced as such. You can do a lot more with base 12.
That said, I'm either a base ten units with base ten numbers or base 12 units with base 12 numbers guy. Remember the French revolution decriminalized the calendar and clock, which is silly. We shouldn't be crossing bases with measurements.
tl;dr: It’s easier in everyday situations because it’s more whole numbers.
It's easy to talk about a third of a circle because it's 120 degrees, or a third of a foot because it's 4 inches, but it's harder to talk about a third of a meter because it's 33.333333... centimeters.
base-12 is definitely a thing and i'm sure a lot of people found it useful to make measurements based on it, but base-10 is more intuitive because fingers are a more obvious thing to count than non-thumb knuckles. not to say that you can't have base-12 measurements in a culture where the language uses a different base, given people are smart enough to figure out the advantages, but it's kind of fighting the tide.
It's honestly commendable how deadpan they are. And you actually learn some French Revolution history too. Kinda ruins it when you have to remember Carlson is a fascist.
Measurement at all is capitalist extravagance. It stems from mercantile notions of of 'fair' trade, which is to say, the necessity for the merchant class to refine their scams. The true proletarian measurement is "about ye much" and you hold your hands apart or pinch with your fingers
