A metric tonne (1000 kg) should be called a megagram (1 Mg).

BarqsHasBite@lemmy.ca to Showerthoughts@lemmy.world – 511 points –
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But I do have the feeling many US people treat imperial units like completely different things and have absolutely no mental concept of a relation between them, especially between length and volume.

There is certainly no shortage of Americans that don't understand the metric system, or hate it for nonsensical reasons. I was once asked to measure a piece of wood and I said it in centimeters because it was exactly x cm long, and they said something to the effect of "not that commie shit". They seriously wanted to work with fractions of an inch instead of touching that evil foreign system.

That’s just a completely arbitrary thing. It’s easier to answer „how tall are you“ with „one eighty“ instead of „five foot eleven“ 🤷‍♀️

Its arbitrary if its not something you care about. Also that's not a great example for height. Usually its just two syllables. 5' 4", 5' 5" etc. You only have to say foot if you are an exact number of feet tall. That way you don't tell anyone "I'm 6". Most people's height in cm will not be a multiple of ten, so it will be longer than 180's three syllables.

It doesn’t seem to be an issue for „metric people“ at all, nobody is missing the foot in Europe.

It's just an inconvenience, it's not worth learning imperial to save a little time. Especially when no one around you would understand what you're talking about.

I still fail to see those advantages.

The units are usually sized intuitively for everyday use. Just look at Fahrenheit vs Celsius. The only thing I use Fahrenheit for is the weather. 0 is too cold, 100 is too hot. That's subjective of course, but it seems more intuitive to me than Celsius. The boiling point of water doesn't matter to me when I'm deciding what clothes to wear for the weather. Celsius works fine but it makes less sense for that application in my opinion.

Yes, because you’re used doing so, not because it’s more practical or convenient.

Or, Europeans only use metric for those things because they don't know imperial. I'm not saying that's a bad thing either, if you don't know imperial then its not worth learning. The advantages are small enough that its not worth the effort, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

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