Comments by "redfish337" (@redfish337) on "Why America still uses Fahrenheit" video.

  1. It was invented in the Netherlands by an ethnic German from Poland(more or less).
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  2. It's antiquated but at the core, not worse across the board. The decimal system is only better in that it's been standardized and it is more widely used. A fraction based system is perfectly usable and occasionally preferable. It just hasn't been optimized as really only the US uses it now and Americans are pretty laissez-faire with this sort of thing. I won't say a decimal system isn't preferable generally. I will say it's not ALWAYS preferable. And, to be frank, adoption of one system, while convenient for correspondence, does lead to a bit of a rut in thinking.
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  3. It is well known that English is the best language in the world. Why do so many idiots use other languages when English is clearly the best? We should continually tell the Chinese that they are idiots for using an antiquated system of thousands of hieroglyphics that requires years of memorization. Didn't anyone every tell them there's gotta be a better way than all their stupid characters? English just has 26 letters. Why do you need thousands? That's stupid. Ban your stupid language and learn English. *In case that went over your head, that was all sarcasm. Having a lingua franca... nowadays English, is valuable. As everyone who's ever learned English would know, spelling and pronunciation is all over the place in English. It's terrible in all sorts of ways. And Chinese is terrible in a bunch of other ways. As is every other language, all with their own advantages and disadvantages. It doesn't really matter what is the lingua franca, merely that one exists. And with that in mind, all kids in the US are still taught Celsius. We don't have as good of a grasp of it in terms of like, hunch power (though I've lived abroad now so I can make a good guess either way, or convert in a few seconds). But we know about it. So we use global common systems of English and Metric. But in our day to day measurements we use what amounts to Japanese or whatever. Relatively useless outside of our "island" in terms of getting people to understand the meaning. So we'd have to convert to the shared language of metric. Nevertheless, would you just suggest wiping out say, the Japanese language, on account of it being relatively useless globally? You know every language has certain advantages and disadvantages, and knowledge of multiple allows for a greater range of expression than can be given in one- the disadvantages of one tend to be covered by the advantages of the other. And such is true for measurements too. Overall, metric systems may be superior, but Imperial systems can still shine in certain applications. Perhaps more importantly, driving all other systems to extinction would suggest that metric is the only way, when it is merely the way of the majority. Metric system proponents end up being the real Imperialists. =P
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