• If I were to write a programme where it would be typical to choose between units of measurement, which I’m not, the drop down menu would have a choice of “SI units” and “fuck no, you don’t get to choose!”

    • ancap shark
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      3 months ago

      Programme?

      Edit: I looked it up, it’s a British thing. I’m not a native speaker, I’ve never seen it written like that. It looks French, I thought you guys hated the French.

      • Hossenfeffer
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        123 months ago

        We actually use program for computer programs, but programme for a programe of events. We like to be irregular.

            • @el_abuelo@lemmy.ml
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              03 months ago

              Better is subjective. If one measured the merits of the language on its rich cultural history, then British (as usual) wins. However, if it’s measured by accessibility for simpletons then the US (as usual) wins.

              • @KrankyKong@lemmy.world
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                3 months ago

                Are you suggesting that US English isn’t derived from British English? Or are you specifically talking about the history over the last couple hundred years? The US isn’t that old, and also has a rich cultural history…

                Maybe an example of how Britain’s rich cultural history has better shaped the language is in order.

      • @hakase@lemm.ee
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        73 months ago

        Almost half of all English words are borrowed from French, dating from when England was colonized and culturally subjugated by the Norman French starting in 1066.

        • ancap shark
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          43 months ago

          I’m aware. I just find it funny that some British words like “centre” and “colour” look more French than the US counterpart

    • @Thief_of_Crows@lemmy.ml
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      -13 months ago

      For most people the imperial system is better. Fahrenheit puts 0-100 in relation to how humans feel heat, 0 is very cold, 100 is very hot, neither will kill you if you take minor precautions. Feet are the same, most everyday objects are spread across 0-10 feet long/tall. Using celsius and meters requires using a scale between -18 and 38, and a scale between 0 and 3.3. Both are clearly inferior number ranges to use when we arent required to.

  • @lars
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    163 months ago

    The UX is onto something tho. What caused feet to become sooooooooo much more goddam popular in the last 10 years?

    Like it’s my understanding that gays grew a condom fetish after AIDS began killing everyone in the 1900s…

    • @shneancy@lemmy.world
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      173 months ago

      a big group of people have always liked feet. It’s one of those kinks accidentally caused by our anatomy - the nerves going out to your feet connect to the spinal cord close to the nerves going out to your genitals, and sometimes the signal travels along both lines.

      It’s such a close connection many people, myself included, can feel a particularly strong orgasm in their feet. It’s a very distinct feeling as if electricity running down through your leg, into the foot, and “climaxing” in your ring toe, making it curl and twitch a bit (i also suspect this is the exact reason why the ring toe is associated with love [though idk how farspread this factoid is]). I don’t have a foot fetish but I can definitely see how it’d be very easy to create an association between strong arousal and feet

      and per the popularity part - people are just much more open about the kinks they have. To the point where even vanilla people start getting curious about soft kinks like spanking, blindfolds, or fluffy handcuffs

      • @lars
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        73 months ago

        I forgot about the foot twitch

    • @GiveMemes@jlai.lu
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      103 months ago

      I’m bi and I don’t know anybody with a condom fetish lmaoooo. Almost everybody is on PREP now specifically so they don’t have to use condoms lol. Maybe your understanding is poisoned by the fact that you call us “the gays” and don’t actually seem to interact with any lgbt people on the regular.

      • @lars
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        53 months ago

        Gay guy here. No condom fetish.

        • Liz
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          53 months ago

          Gay people are generally fairly slutty. Image if ever guy’s dream slut was also just another guy. Well, they all have the same attraction to sluts, so they all end up being sluts for each other. Sluts for sluts.

          Generalizations cannot be applied to the individual.

          Slut.

        • @GiveMemes@jlai.lu
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          43 months ago

          1/2 the world population has herpes and like 1/10 in the US. It’s literally just a painful rash and the outbreaks can be treated.

          • Liz
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            23 months ago

            More like 70% of the US adult population if you include the asymptomatic carriers of both HSV 1 and 2.

        • @Drewelite@lemmynsfw.com
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          43 months ago

          I’ve used Blender for years. Recently I was looking for a video editor. Somebody suggested use Blender. I thought, okay this will be funny, let’s try it. Don’t get me wrong Premier (best IMO) is better if you can get it for free. But damn… it was actually comparable!!

        • @Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
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          23 months ago

          Yes.
          Still s shame they didn’t pick a kinker name.

          • “oh, that’s great, what software do you work in?”
          • “I use Tentakke, it’s fully open source, it’s great!”
    • @SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml
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      33 months ago

      Lived in the UK for quite some time now. Still can’t wrap my head around stone…which is kinda ironic being a Stonemason and all…

      • As someone who isnt from the… I think two or three? countries in this world that still use the imperial system standard is metric for me. So yes, if someone means the US customary system and isn’t in the USA they shouldn’t say standard or they’ll confuse people

  • @mariusafa
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    33 months ago

    The only place where feet makes sense as a unit is in aviation. And I think that’s it.

      • @mariusafa
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        13 months ago

        Because you have smaller steps. When flying very low for example helicopters it makes mor sense to have smaller steps.

  • @jawa21
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    -133 months ago

    I may get a lot of flack for this, but here is my perspective as someone with over 20 years experience as a machinist in the US. Over the course of my career, I have become more than comfortable using metric, imperial, and us custimary units.

    For science? Metric is fantastic. For literally everything else - us customary is faster, easier, more understandable, and actually more approachable in terms of trying to actually build something.

    Let’s start with simply building something as the first example. Fractions, (and angles relative to fractions) are more intuitive to work with, faster, and overall easier to work with than decimal equivalents. One could easily spend more time trying to measure 1.905 cm vs very quickly dividing 1 into 3/4".

    Furthermore, units are just that. An arbitrarily agreed upon measurement. None of them make any “more sense” than any other. If the Royal Society had agreed on a hogs head as a standard unit of volume, we’d likely still be using it.

    I may be rambling at thus point. However, my entire point here is that there is objectively no such thing as a superior unit of measure. They are all made up and have uses that they are best suited for.

    • @MindTraveller@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      One could easily spend more time trying to measure 1.905 cm vs very quickly dividing 1 into 3/4".

      If the standard is written in Metric, the factory that makes the parts uses metric, and the place where the parts are used uses metric, why don’t they just use 2cm screws instead?

      Your argument for the convenience of imperial is that the standard uses imperial. No shit. It would be just as hard to cut something to 0.787" inches if the standard were in metric.

      Also the reason metric makes more sense is I don’t need a calculator to convert centimeters to kilometres. You need a calculator to convert inches to miles. AND you have to memorise the conversion factor! What a waste of brainpower

        • @MindTraveller@lemmy.ca
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          13 months ago

          Yes, obviously dozenal metric is better than decimal metric, but decimal metric is better than imperial.

          Where Metric really shines is conversion between unlike units. In Metric, the equation for voltage is V=IR, and it’s so convenient Imperial didn’t bother to make their own version of it, so americans use metric for electricity. I can use kilograms and meters to calculate force, while you silly americans have to convert inches and pounds into different pounds using a conversion factor. Then I can use meters again to get pascals, or I can use meters differently to get joules. You’re stuck using a conversion factor to get calories. Then I can use seconds to get watts, and we’re back in electricity territory where you fools have to convert over to our measurements to keep up. Metric is awesome!

      • @jawa21
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        -83 months ago

        That was also part of my point. I am tired of people trying to impose one unit or series of units being superior when they are all just made up.

        • @SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          133 months ago

          The reason metric makes sense is because its standard, and 90% of the world uses it. Being the odd one out just causes problems in the long term, especially as we move towards a more globalized world.

    • @stelelor@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      What is your professional opinion on decimal feet? I had to use such a measuring tape at work, it took me half a day to figure out what was going on with that abomination.

      Edit: to clarify, feet were divided in 10 units, not 12, so one and a half feet was at the “5” mark between 1 and 2 ft, not the “6” mark.

      • @jawa21
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        53 months ago

        Sadly, at that point, you need to know the decimal equivalent (this happpens often with precision measurement) for instance 1/4 is 0.25 etc. I agree that it is horrible for a tape measure style measurement, but it isn’t so bad once you’re used to seeing the fractional equivalent as a decimal.

      • @swunchy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        33 months ago

        This. Base 10 sucks because it’s harder to evenly divide. People give imperial a bunch of shit because the conversion factors are weird (and they really are), but have no problem with time units which are even more fucked up. We use a metric-like system for measuring units smaller than a second (milli, micro, nano seconds), but then there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, etc etc. The Gregorian calendar doesn’t even have a simple conversion between things like days and months! It depends on the fucking month!

        • @Bertuccio@lemmy.world
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          23 months ago

          Time up to days isn’t even that bad - it’s just base 60 because we get that part from ancient Mesopotamians who liked base 60 for the same reasons people like 12 (but maybe went a little overboard?). Since 12 is a factor of 60, going to base 12 would make hours-minutes-seconds jive better with other numbers. Only changing to base 12, a half day would be written as 10 hours, full day 20 hours. An hour as 50 minutes. A minute as 50 seconds.

          I think there’s no helping higher than that - there’s no relation between months and days or months and years - they’re separate cycles that we just smushed together one day and refuse to separate. And days and years aren’t related in a convenient integer. Some things would coincidentally work out - 2 years could be written as 20 months - but for the most part there’s no way to line it up nicely.

    • @discount_door_garlic@lemmy.world
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      53 months ago

      For science? Metric is fantastic. For literally everything else - us customary is faster, easier, more understandable, and actually more approachable in terms of trying to actually build something.

      Americans keep saying this shit as if the vast majority of the world doesn’t use grams for baking, celcius for temps, and cm for height daily - nobody is imposing anything on you guys, but you are going to continue to be ridiculed for using the dumbest measurement system. Yes, some systems absolutely make more sense than others - having even division of all orders of magnitude is a good example of that.

      One could easily spend more time trying to measure 1.905 cm vs very quickly dividing 1 into 3/4". This is purely a skill issue. You’re also clearly being biased by picking a rounded imperial fraction as the basis of comparison, and complaining the metric equivalent is unwieldy. (50mm is 1.968504 inches - oh wow! oh no! how will anybody figure it out?) Of course they don’t neatly line up, they’re not meant to - it doesn’t make working in metric harder because I’m not using both systems? If I need hardware, I have M3 through to M8 for normal screws, bolts, washers, etc. - trying to use imperial is a clusterfuck - they don’t even use the same fucking denominator, thread pitch is not standardised, nothing makes sense, it’s a garbage system.

      How many inches in a foot? thats easy - how many feet in a yard?..uh okay a little weirder, yards to a furlong? the fuck - furlongs to fathoms to miles to -… its inconsistent unpredictable garbage because it’s not in any way related to the units above or below it. That’s all WITHIN DISTANCE - good fucking luck if you want to convert that to volume or energy or anything else. mm > cm > m > km - all base 10. Predictable, consistently divisible.

      There is no persecution here - you can use fucking apples to measure distance if you like - but please stop portraying SI units as this scientific conundrum which is incompatible with daily life or professional ease. Imperial isn’t actually any easier, americans are just familiar with it All but 2 countries in the entire world have switched over because the benefits self-evidently outweigh the costs…america acts like using dumb dumb units is a patriotic holdout but it is such an ongoing own-goal.

        • @discount_door_garlic@lemmy.world
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          23 months ago

          you’re not hearing me - Its fine - please stop trying to convince me how difficult millimetres are, I went to school, I use them with no difficulty It’s really not rocket science to say ‘1.75m’ - we’re all surviving just fine. (Believe it or not, there are even craftsmen using millimetres! 😱) Base 12 is lovely, it’s very cute that you can say ‘3/8ths of an inch’ but it isn’t some universal human truth that fractions are easier than decimals - wait till you see that you can express inch subdivisions as decimals, and metric subdivisions as fractions!

          SI is more logical in paper, it is also still more logical in practice. A base 10 unit I have never heard of before intuitively tells me what it measures and how big it is by the word alone. “Decilitres” is not really used outside of europe, but I immediately know it’s volumetric and 10x the scale of litres. Inherently logical. How many fluid ounces are in a liquid gallon? The answer is ‘good fucking luck’ or ‘12 is easy to subdivide by, but now I have to remember every single measurement relation by writ’

          The most commonly used “standard” measurements are the way they are because they were the most useful measurements for actual craftspeople to standardize to, while the SI system was dreamt up by a bunch of rich French people.

          The ‘S’ in ‘SI’ literally is the standard measurement system. It is the only universal and internationally standardised system. US feet are slightly different to UK feet, and Australian tablespoons were different to german ones - and if you think SI was dreamt up by a bunch of rich French people, firstly, that’s a bit disingenuous - not how that happened at all, but secondly, you’re going to absolutely lose your shit when you find out the basis of the ‘foot’ (it was the kings fucking foot, a super standardised unit of measurement)

          As I said before, I’m not forcing you to use the dreaded centimetre - but please stop advocating against SI units because of hOw hArD tHeY aRe - it’s fine, complete idiots use kms without issue, we’re all gonna survive without reverting to fucking cubits.