Comment on You've Just Been Hit By The Metric System Boys

• night_petal@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Actually, I’m in the mood to go on a rant here. You’re using the metric system incorrectly. The odds are that you will list something as ~900 mm. Be mad, whatever, but I’ve seen this kind of thing on literally thousands of prints. Sure, for formal precision reasons you’d list it that way. However, in my long career not a single person has used the feature of metric that should make it easy. Not a single person has ever mentioned deca/deci/hexa etc. meters. Ever. Metric is far and away objectively not simpler; most people just refuse to use it to its full potential to make it even easier by only thinking in 4 units (those being mm, cm, m, and 1km). Actually, metric technically has infinite units.

  I’ve had a long professional career of measuring physical things. They’re both bad. Dozenal and fractional systems are objectively faster for building/making things. Decimal is better if you want to measure small things/amounts.

  Then there’s the fact that ISO 9001 tolerances are much higher for metric listings. Yeah, it’s incredibly stupid that prints that are transferred from most places to the US and vice versa get converted twice from both systems. However, the 9001 standard for metric tolerances is usually +/- 0.05mm, which is 0.002". In my line of work that is a huge tolerance. Siemens Medical is the worst about this. They allow 0.381mm everywhere, which is 0.015". I’m not trying to say that US manufacturing is better, or vice versa. It’s just that both systems have ways of being awful.

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  • sumsinj@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    So please give me an example of “building things” and why metric would not be better when measuring "small things*. Like I can measure anything in both units just fine, its whats the tool is telling me isn’t it? So it’s either about up/down scaling, which is just multiply by 10^x for the amount you need (aka slide the decimal point to where you need it)

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