It’s ridiculous when the metric and old English measurements are mixed up. For instance, yesterday I needed to buy a tent pole pin that was 8 mm in diameter. There was similar tent pole pins being sold that were 0.3 inches in diameter. 3 tenths of an inch. Really? I thought what the hell, close enough. HA!

Culture, more than anything.

In US culture, words like ‘thousand, million, billion’ have a highly specific meaning, while Mega, giga, and the like have a rather inexact meaning. (Come to our Mega-blowout of used cars!). The ‘european’ measures just aren’t culturally meaningful in the US.

Besides, we tried the whole metric shtick back in the 1970s and it failed. You aren’t going to ‘reeducate’ 340 million people to a system where they don’t see any benefit in changing.

Would that be an Imperial Billion or an American Billion?

The world consists of many countries and cultures. When in Rome…

There are various de-facto uses that will never change the varied measurement values.

We will never hear about financial terms in Kilo Dollars

We will never hear that 1.5 Mega people died of Covid.

@Forever_Free
But we should.

Thinking of this discussion, why do we need prefixes to discuss numbers? Why not hundred/thousand/million? For larger orders of magnitude, be precise with the power: 10^8 for 100 million.

You never hear someone say “7.2 deka inches” because it is clearer to say “2 yards.”

@zenvelo
Under the correct system you would be using neither inches, nor yards. Those would be outlawed under threat of guillotine.

^^ yes, bring back the guillotine. Trump has stollen Peta Dollars. Let him be first.

We have Kilowatt, Megabytes, Gigahertz.

Mega doesn’t always mean million in America so that would be difficult. It can just mean big or multiple.

Interesting that @rebbel rings up Megabytes, since that is not 1 million bytes but 1,024 Kilobytes.

@zenvelo
That is no longer true.
A megabyte now means 1 million bytes.
The term for the 1024 version is “Mebibyte”.

We don’t use those prefixes because that would make too much fucking sense, and we can’t have that now, can we.

Yeah, everybody could just speak pig latin. Roblempay olvedsay!

You should really be measuring your deviant tendencies in Furman Units.

I switched months ago and I feel much more competitive now.

@ragingloli , According to Merriam-Webster, a kilobyte is 1024 bytes.
For anyone wondering where 1024 comes from, here is a good explanation

@LostInParadise
https://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html