this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2025
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From John Bazell “In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.”
I was in a situation similar to this one in real life: having to adjust the salt level in a pool.
In metric:
The pool is 8*4 m long and 2m deep on average, the current salt level is 2g/l and the salt comes in 20kg bags.
How many bags of salts do I need to pour in the pool to adjust the salt level to at least 3g/l ?
Answer:
In imperial:
The pool is 20*10ft long and 5ft deep on average, the current salt level is 2000ppm and the salt comes in 40lbs bags.
How many bags of salts do I need to pour in the pool to adjust the salt level to at least 3000ppm?
Answer:
Home pools here are almost never saltwater.
We simply add chlorine tabs until the pH is the correct color on the strips. Even if we knew it would be 62.4 lbs of salt, it's not like you can buy a 62.4 lb bag of salt.
But yeah, it is a lot harder to do applied math in the US, which is why science here went metric :)
It's a shame because salt water pools are honestly so much better and I think overall it was cheaper for us as well.
Instead of adding chlorine every week the salt system just keeps the chlorine level at the right minimal level all the time. So no chlorine smell in the pool and the pool was much cleaner.
Poor silly creature. Your year has 12 months, each with a different number of days. Your hour has 60 minutes. Your day has 24 hours. If you are critical of inconvenient metrics then you are critical of your own measurement of time. We're embarrassed for you. :)
Observe: https://metric-time.com/
The French made some attempts at making metric time a thing, but no one really liked it.
Because convenient metrics aren't strictly better than standardized ones.
There are 12 months but only 4 differend lenghts
You use the same system, but i can convert pretty easy from km/h to m/s. Can you calculate from mph/h to ft/s.
Atleast we can count to 24 and not get overhelmed at the 12
Time is also funny metric because lenght of day and lenght if year changes slowly all the time
In grand scale time is also relative measurement
If metric is so bad why you guys use it when you need to precise