this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2026
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Like, I'm at a shop right now, and outside the window are some scooters.
How many scooters?
I think in units of scooters, not pieces of metal in scooter shape that add up to a volume of mass and energy. Because that's not what I'm thinking about right now, I just see six scooters, and you instantly know that there are six scooters.
But you don't measure the number of scooters by the gram either.
since we're talking hypotheticals, sometimes you order sausages by the unit, sometimes you order them by weight.
honestly idc which really, i am the best sassage eater on the team just give me the damn wurst. give me the damn wurst.
I like to measure a number of wursts by how excited I am to receive them, which can be challenging because this is not a linear function.
I'm at about a 6 on this scale. I have somewhat-happy wursts arriving tomorrow morning.
This is true, but that's because everybody has accepted the unit of scooter as the accepted unit count for scooters....
Okay that's a bad example, because just counting things is the way to count things. But also, maybe that's the point - maybe, counting things is just super simple, and why direct or single-level abstract measurements is the difference: metric = relating everything to a single point, and imperial = just counting. Yeah? Maybe?
I'm not really following. What, are we counting feet, then? Mine?
Feet are just really entrenched in the way Americans think about lengths. It may not sound like it's abstract, but it is. If I said "yeah, it's about sixteen hands long", people would have to parse wtf I'm talking about, but then have to grapple with how long a "hand" is exactly and what 16 of them means.
Depends on how into feet the person is
The foot is no less arbitrary than the meter. If you are just unfamiliar with the unit and confused by the fact it's named after something often close in size to it that's fine, but keep in mind for a while a meter was defined as the length of a specific metal rod, same as the foot and yard.
Meter was defined as 1/10M of the length from equator to the pole. It's not exact because the size was established by people literally measuring the distance while traveling. They got really close though. Rest of the units were derived from that length such as 10cm cube of water is 1kg and so on.
Meter is pretty useful though, a large step step is around one meter so you can measure a field by walking after a bit of practice to get the step right. The height of people's waist is around 1m also.
The point you make about counting is not really an advantage since in metric we count in meters, 10s of centimeters, centimeters, 100s of meters or kilometer which is roughly 10 minutes walking.
The difference is that when you need to do calculation or anything scientific it becomes super easy to convert between units. A cubic meter of water is 1 metric ton (1000kg), 1L of water is 1kg so you can just measure 250ml of milk (~ a cup) by adding 250g of water to a bowl. A tablespoon by adding 15g and a teaspoon by adding 5g.
It makes cooking and baking a lot easier since you don't need to bring out a whole range of measurement equipment because you can often just use a scale instead.
Then we have Fahrenheit temp scale. Goes from 0 very cold and 100 very hot. Both are intuitive after a while but metric make it very easy to reason about larger ranges and how close to freezing something is outside.
Bottom line is that both are very arbitrary but any time you go outside some regular guesstimates of "this is x long" metric becomes easier.
Oh to be clear, imperial sucks and everyone would be better off just adopting metric, I'm mostly just arguing it doesn't suck as much or in as many ways as you seem to think.
yeah sometimes it feels like someone with a wallet full of mickey money screaming that all fiat currency is evil
I was with you until you said the foot is no less arbitrary than the meter. The foot is just a useful size and changed depending on whenever the king decided. The meter was defined by the French using Earth. To say they're both equally arbitrary is untrue.
Imperial units are nice to work in when accuracy is more important than precision. Want a third of a foot, that's four inches exactly. A third of a meter is 33.333 cm repeated. It really depends on the situation which is more useful, but metric is more often than not the useful choice.
All the original metric definitions (except seconds I think, but guess what imperial shares exactly) were extremely arbitrary, either relying on assumptions later shown to be false (such as exactly how earth curved) or varied enough to make the units imprecise during sensitive enough measurements (every definition that included water). Those problems have since been corrected, but imperial has also since been defined in terms of metric so the same can equally be said of it.
Nothing stopping you from just saying 1/3rd metre. Fractions still work!
But then you lose a good 99% of what makes metric great, which is the trivial decimalization of it.
Sure. It's an option though, works fine.
I just don't think it's a valid criticism to point out that infinite numbers exist.
Yeah, they're both arbitrary. You agree with me.
The "things" being counted in either respect are abstract and are only "known" if they are familiar.
There are four scooters
My heart yearns for the humanity, passion, integrity, competence, and empathy that that show promised me.