uralsolo [he/him] @ uralsolo @hexbear.net

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2 yr. ago

I think there was a robot war but then superheroes appeared and invented mega science and solved most of the world's problems even though sometimes they still have to fight robots and supervillains. It's basically the DC comic universe (which is a lot more optimistic than the cinematic one lmao).

MS have commited to make sure all their stuff is available on Steam

Remember Games for Windows Live?

mass starvation records under mao

You mean the last Chinese famine, after a thousand years of recurring famines which happened under every Chinese regime, and were solved once and for all by the end of the Great Leap Forward? Yes let's talk about those.

I mean there will be a point when the Chinese middle class stops growing and the government will need to midwife a new economic model. A Communist Party is probably the only political organization currently in the world that can come up with an answer that isn't slashing the social safety net and giving big handouts to corporations to keep profits up, though.

From the fact that they can sell them at a higher price.

China is the most democratic country in the world, full stop, with around a million elections every year.

God I wish my cost of living could deflate a bit.

Economists say its bad but I don't believe them.

I make a .zip and rename it to .tar.gz and laugh

Once again your argument has gone somewhat obliquely past mine and not actually addressed it, although I do appreciate how incredibly smug you are telling me I don't know what my own argument is.

I never said that standardization was bad, what I said was that the references for standard measures were more useful. We don't carry around rods for poking oxen much anymore, so that unit of measure is rightly confined to history.

You're acting like the 'standards' of one unit are superior to the 'standards' of another unit

As I said elsewhere anyone can get used to anything. I was also propagandized in school by teachers who insisted over and over for years that metric was better and that using anything else was a waste of time - it was only when I became an adult and started making shit for myself that I realized the truth.

The metric system was applied across the entire world and wiped out almost every single indigenous standard of measure that existed previously. The English unit of measures has a similar history vis a vis the British Empire spreading it, but my argument would be that indigenous measurements writ large should have been retained, not that they should have been wiped out once and for all by a second, even more imperial system.

I'm afraid you missed the point of mine. Anybody can "get used to" pretty much anything, but the difference between standard measurements and metric is that standard measurements are based on practical things that people interact with every day, while metric measurements were worked out on paper by the French bourgeoisie over a hundred years ago. They sought to use rationality to make a better measurement system, and in doing so made one that is totally untethered to the human experience.

read the xkcd

I've read the xkcd, the xkcd only responds to one common argument against the metric system, one which I am not making.

Because the bourgeoisie that lead the French Revolution famously remained 100% in lockstep with the underclasses. There was never a moment where the needs of the rulers diverged from the needs of the masses and a whole new regime of class strife arose from it, no sir.

The metric system was applied top-down to french society by its ruling class, it was not some grassroots attempt to make the world better.

read the xkcd comic

There's nothing quite as intuitive as a table of numbers and associations that you can memorize by rote. Pass me my flash cards!

a kilometre is a trivially visualized distance

Only when you've gotten used to it. The thing with your examples is that very rarely does anyone actually need a kilofoot or 1/100th of a foot, but they very, very frequently need a mile or an inch. Metric was designed to make sense on paper, standard measurements were designed to be useful in every day situations.

That's awful. Nobody on the planet has any frame of reference for the distance from the equator to the poles. The measurements used by people in the real world should be based on something they encounter frequently.

What's important here is that the standard measurements evolved naturally from people doing and making things. The common lengths were so chosen because they were easy to "eyeball" for craftspeople, and they were lengths that were useful to make things in - not some arbitrary designation based on phenomenon far outside the human experience.

An inch it about the distance between the two knuckles on your forefinger.

A mile is about one thousand steps, or fifteen minutes of travel at a brisk pace

A cup is a cup, before portion sizes got daffy there was a pretty common cup that everybody had.

"Standard" measurements were refined over thousands of years by actual artisans making actual crafts. Metric was designed by a bunch of rich French people and foisted on the rest of the world because it makes more sense on paper, regardless of how in practical use it requires you to break out a ton of awkward decimals and other contrivances to make it match the human experience.

Feet are way more intuitive than meters, doesn't matter which one you grew up with because one is based on something intuitive like the size of a foot while the other is based on some weird shit about how far light travels in a tiny fraction of a second.