7 ms·

Lol every time I see the word "feet" I'm reminded that this article isn't targeted to anyone but Americans, even when talking about manufacturing lines in Asia.

by usui 5y ago

Lol every time I see the word "feet" I'm reminded that this article isn't targeted to anyone but Americans, even when talking about manufacturing lines in Asia. My East Asian bias is showing but in all my experience I absolutely have never had to use those units in a serious professional context. Any time I see a technically-sounding article use units like "feet" and "football fields" I subconsciously find it very difficult to take anything afterward seriously. I admit it's irrational since units are arbitrary and orthogonal anyway, but it seems... forced. Is it really necessary to use those units in a technical context in order to relate to your readers? EDIT: Lots of America-centric people are jumping onto me for this initial comment, stating that WSJ is built for its /true/ target audience, /Americans/. What sparked my comment was the fact I was reading this article in Japanese. The aforementioned numbers and graph are expressed in feet, so this kind of forced conversion across industry domain and language barrier seemed contrived and got me started on this train of thought. https://jp.wsj.com/articles/the-chip-shortage-has-made-a-star-of-this-little-known-component-11630992492 https://jp.wsj.com/articles/the-chip-shortage-has-made-a-sta...

genewitch 5y ago
The difference between 185 million ft^2 and whatever you pick doesn't matter. It may as well be in hectares or "multiples of some lake somewhere", it's a massive number. You have, and are probably using right now, a voice controlled computer that can convert anything to anything else, by just asking. Is it really worth typing this every time an American site uses American language? We all get it, Americans with their imperial units, ha ha.
- usui 5y ago
  I think you might have missed that I already stated that it's an irrational thing to complain about because units in nature are arbitrary, but given that no one uses these units for the topic at hand, why use them at all? Just for relatability? > It may as well be in hectares or "multiples of some lake somewhere", it's a massive number. We're saying the same thing but arguing for the opposite. Like I said, no one in a technical capacity uses these units seriously. So then if the number is so conceptually massively big and the units don't matter, why go through the extra forced effort of converting to imperial? Just use the units that the specifications come in and the numbers that the factories use? The more you play with vast unit conversions like this, the more you risk losing information across sources/citations. What if I want to do my own research later on? It's more work if I'm searching for specific numbers on Google. We also know just how terrible Google Search results are getting nowadays, so... > We all get it, Americans with their imperial units, ha ha. I think this is an uncharitable interpretation of my comment. I'm not trying to make fun of Americans, I'm trying to understand what the extra efort is worth for?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - cptskippy 5y ago
    > why use them at all? Just for relatability? Yes. Was that hard? The WSJ didn't write this article for you, it isn't an industry rag. This is like complaining that their scientific articles try to dumb it down for a layman's depth. A football field or soccer field is a perfectly reasonable unit of measure when you're simply trying to convey "a lot" to someone.
    - trangus_1985 5y ago
      I don't particularly agree with the parent comment, but you are being oddly aggressive over something that is a real problem - communicating things is hard and it's a useful topic to consider in a world that increasingly runs on text-based communication.
      - cptskippy 5y ago
        Insulting and making fun of people because they have a problem isn't helpful but ok, but responding "aggressively" to insults is bad?
        scrollaway 5y ago
        I don't see any insults or "making fun of people" in the comments you're responding to. You're choosing to see that. Apply the Principle of good faith and you'll see you're the one getting worked up over nothing...
        cptskippy 5y ago
        I'm sorry you feel like I'm worked up but please don't put that on me. I've linked to the OP's original comment but to paraphrase: "LOL, I can't take anyone seriously when they use Imperial units. It's unprofessional." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28449058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28449058
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  Funny, because it's about 1700Ha, what is a perfectly relatable number, or, if you like your numbers small, 1.7km^2. That's around the size of a district.
- amelius 5y ago
  > You have, and are probably using right now, a voice controlled computer that can convert anything to anything else, by just asking. There should be a browser plugin that automatically converts units behind the scenes.
- mulmen 5y ago
  > We all get it, Americans with their imperial units, ha ha. It's really very tired. Americans don't even use Imperial units. We use United States Customary Units [1] which are more like siblings to Imperial units than offspring. United States customary units have been based on familiar Metric units since the Mendenhall Order in 1893. School children in the United States have studied the metric system for generations. The United States was one of the original 17 signatories of the Metre Convention in 1875. As far as I can tell no commonwealth countries were early adopters. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units
  - throwaway210222 5y ago
    > We use United States Customary Units Actually no, not for potential difference, current, resistance, impedance, luminosity, amount-ofsubstance … For those you use the SI units. Its just length, mass, (plus force and torque). Not far to go.
    - mulmen 5y ago
      The United States does not use "Imperial" units. We use some Customary Units that are defined in terms of SI units and share names with some Imperial units. The point is that saying "The United States uses Imperial Units" is, generously, ignorant.
      - Taniwha 5y ago
        yes - for example a US fluid Oz is different from everywhere else, as is a cup, a pint, a Venti (twenty what?) and many of the units used in cooking - using American recipes without translation can produce crap - Imperial fluid ounces are totally different largely due tax politics of the 1700/1800s
        mulmen 5y ago
        Venti is not a US Customary Unit.
- sandworm101 5y ago
  "185 million ft^2" and "185 million square feet" are two radically different numbers. One is a square 35 thousand miles on each side. The other is a square 2.6 miles each side.
  - bruce343434 5y ago
    You're thinking of a "(185 million feet) square"
cvs268 5y ago
You sir/madam, have mastered the art of saying a lot and yet saying nothing.
- dang 5y ago
  Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of how bad another comment is or you feel it is. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
burkaman 5y ago
Yes, it is necessary to use language that is familiar to most of your audience when writing something.
perl4ever 5y ago
A meter seems to me linked to the human body just as much as the foot. "The metre was originally defined in 1793 as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle" That factor of ten is because we have ten fingers. There's no cosmic significance to ten or ten million. Or to the size of a line of longitude on our particular planet. And a meter is almost exactly a yard, or three feet anyway.
- oblio 5y ago
  > There's no cosmic significance to ten or ten million. Cosmic? No. But social? For sure. 99.99% of math the layman will encounter is in base 10.
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    Picture some American saying there's no point in knowing languages other than English because 99.99% of the people you will encounter know it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Standard_Whitworth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Standard_Whitworth
    - oblio 5y ago
      Thankfully we're slowly getting rid of that abomination and replacing it with something reasonable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_metric_screw_thread https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_metric_screw_thread A classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pikrntjcbyw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pikrntjcbyw
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  The use of the decimal system is kind of funny because for the longest time large parts of Europe used a 20 based system for a lot of common math. You can still see this in French, where 99 is spelled out as "four times twenty and nineteen". Even in English you can find the remains of the 20-based system, because of the way numbers are expressed: twenty-one, but not tenny-one or even one-teen; twenty-five but not onety-five but fifteen. The foot is directly based on a person's body part (which caused major issues when bordering jurisdictions used different sizes for a "foot"). The denomination used for meters is a lot more disconnected, its basis focused on the planet instead of on a body part. The choice for the decimal system is much more akin to the choice of 3/12/8/10 in the imperial system. You can also quickly run into issues if you assume a meter is almost exactly a meter, there's a 9% difference there. The difference can quickly add up, and plenty of international orders have been messed up that way. The distances are similar enough that they serve the same use in day to day expressions, but they're certainly not "almost exactly" the same.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
CivBase 5y ago
Well, it is the Wall Street Journal. It shouldn't come as a surprise that an American publication named after an American landmark uses American units. Americans, myself included, generally acknowledge that the metric system is better but we are already familiar with US units. There's nothing really wrong with US units either in terms of accurate measurement. In an ideal world we would use metric, but transitioning would come at monumental costs - never mind the re-training of an entire population - just so we can make unit conversions a tiny bit easier. I get it. You're not familiar with US units like we are so you have to do conversions to make sense of the measurements - probably with a calculator since the ratios aren't simple, whole numbers. But remember Americans have to do the same whenever we read almost any foreign publication. Difference is I never see HN or Reddit comments complaining about metric units.
dang 5y ago
You started a hell of a flamewar with this, and you contributed to perpetuating it too. That's totally not cool here. Please follow the site guidelines, which include: "Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28448249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28448249 and marked it off topic.

by usui 5y ago

genewitch 5y ago

The difference between 185 million ft^2 and whatever you pick doesn't matter. It may as well be in hectares or "multiples of some lake somewhere", it's a massive number. You have, and are probably using right now, a voice controlled computer that can convert anything to anything else, by just asking. Is it really worth typing this every time an American site uses American language? We all get it, Americans with their imperial units, ha ha.

usui 5y ago
I think you might have missed that I already stated that it's an irrational thing to complain about because units in nature are arbitrary, but given that no one uses these units for the topic at hand, why use them at all? Just for relatability? > It may as well be in hectares or "multiples of some lake somewhere", it's a massive number. We're saying the same thing but arguing for the opposite. Like I said, no one in a technical capacity uses these units seriously. So then if the number is so conceptually massively big and the units don't matter, why go through the extra forced effort of converting to imperial? Just use the units that the specifications come in and the numbers that the factories use? The more you play with vast unit conversions like this, the more you risk losing information across sources/citations. What if I want to do my own research later on? It's more work if I'm searching for specific numbers on Google. We also know just how terrible Google Search results are getting nowadays, so... > We all get it, Americans with their imperial units, ha ha. I think this is an uncharitable interpretation of my comment. I'm not trying to make fun of Americans, I'm trying to understand what the extra efort is worth for?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- cptskippy 5y ago
  > why use them at all? Just for relatability? Yes. Was that hard? The WSJ didn't write this article for you, it isn't an industry rag. This is like complaining that their scientific articles try to dumb it down for a layman's depth. A football field or soccer field is a perfectly reasonable unit of measure when you're simply trying to convey "a lot" to someone.
  - trangus_1985 5y ago
    I don't particularly agree with the parent comment, but you are being oddly aggressive over something that is a real problem - communicating things is hard and it's a useful topic to consider in a world that increasingly runs on text-based communication.
    - cptskippy 5y ago
      Insulting and making fun of people because they have a problem isn't helpful but ok, but responding "aggressively" to insults is bad?
      - scrollaway 5y ago
        I don't see any insults or "making fun of people" in the comments you're responding to. You're choosing to see that. Apply the Principle of good faith and you'll see you're the one getting worked up over nothing...
        cptskippy 5y ago
        I'm sorry you feel like I'm worked up but please don't put that on me. I've linked to the OP's original comment but to paraphrase: "LOL, I can't take anyone seriously when they use Imperial units. It's unprofessional." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28449058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28449058
marcosdumay 5y ago
Funny, because it's about 1700Ha, what is a perfectly relatable number, or, if you like your numbers small, 1.7km^2. That's around the size of a district.
amelius 5y ago
> You have, and are probably using right now, a voice controlled computer that can convert anything to anything else, by just asking. There should be a browser plugin that automatically converts units behind the scenes.
mulmen 5y ago
> We all get it, Americans with their imperial units, ha ha. It's really very tired. Americans don't even use Imperial units. We use United States Customary Units [1] which are more like siblings to Imperial units than offspring. United States customary units have been based on familiar Metric units since the Mendenhall Order in 1893. School children in the United States have studied the metric system for generations. The United States was one of the original 17 signatories of the Metre Convention in 1875. As far as I can tell no commonwealth countries were early adopters. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units
- throwaway210222 5y ago
  > We use United States Customary Units Actually no, not for potential difference, current, resistance, impedance, luminosity, amount-ofsubstance … For those you use the SI units. Its just length, mass, (plus force and torque). Not far to go.
  - mulmen 5y ago
    The United States does not use "Imperial" units. We use some Customary Units that are defined in terms of SI units and share names with some Imperial units. The point is that saying "The United States uses Imperial Units" is, generously, ignorant.
    - Taniwha 5y ago
      yes - for example a US fluid Oz is different from everywhere else, as is a cup, a pint, a Venti (twenty what?) and many of the units used in cooking - using American recipes without translation can produce crap - Imperial fluid ounces are totally different largely due tax politics of the 1700/1800s
      - mulmen 5y ago
        Venti is not a US Customary Unit.
sandworm101 5y ago
"185 million ft^2" and "185 million square feet" are two radically different numbers. One is a square 35 thousand miles on each side. The other is a square 2.6 miles each side.
- bruce343434 5y ago
  You're thinking of a "(185 million feet) square"

cvs268 5y ago

You sir/madam, have mastered the art of saying a lot and yet saying nothing.

dang 5y ago
Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of how bad another comment is or you feel it is. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

burkaman 5y ago

Yes, it is necessary to use language that is familiar to most of your audience when writing something.

perl4ever 5y ago

A meter seems to me linked to the human body just as much as the foot. "The metre was originally defined in 1793 as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle" That factor of ten is because we have ten fingers. There's no cosmic significance to ten or ten million. Or to the size of a line of longitude on our particular planet. And a meter is almost exactly a yard, or three feet anyway.

oblio 5y ago
> There's no cosmic significance to ten or ten million. Cosmic? No. But social? For sure. 99.99% of math the layman will encounter is in base 10.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  Picture some American saying there's no point in knowing languages other than English because 99.99% of the people you will encounter know it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Standard_Whitworth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Standard_Whitworth
  - oblio 5y ago
    Thankfully we're slowly getting rid of that abomination and replacing it with something reasonable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_metric_screw_thread https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_metric_screw_thread A classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pikrntjcbyw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pikrntjcbyw
jeroenhd 5y ago
The use of the decimal system is kind of funny because for the longest time large parts of Europe used a 20 based system for a lot of common math. You can still see this in French, where 99 is spelled out as "four times twenty and nineteen". Even in English you can find the remains of the 20-based system, because of the way numbers are expressed: twenty-one, but not tenny-one or even one-teen; twenty-five but not onety-five but fifteen. The foot is directly based on a person's body part (which caused major issues when bordering jurisdictions used different sizes for a "foot"). The denomination used for meters is a lot more disconnected, its basis focused on the planet instead of on a body part. The choice for the decimal system is much more akin to the choice of 3/12/8/10 in the imperial system. You can also quickly run into issues if you assume a meter is almost exactly a meter, there's a 9% difference there. The difference can quickly add up, and plenty of international orders have been messed up that way. The distances are similar enough that they serve the same use in day to day expressions, but they're certainly not "almost exactly" the same.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

CivBase 5y ago

Well, it is the Wall Street Journal. It shouldn't come as a surprise that an American publication named after an American landmark uses American units. Americans, myself included, generally acknowledge that the metric system is better but we are already familiar with US units. There's nothing really wrong with US units either in terms of accurate measurement. In an ideal world we would use metric, but transitioning would come at monumental costs - never mind the re-training of an entire population - just so we can make unit conversions a tiny bit easier. I get it. You're not familiar with US units like we are so you have to do conversions to make sense of the measurements - probably with a calculator since the ratios aren't simple, whole numbers. But remember Americans have to do the same whenever we read almost any foreign publication. Difference is I never see HN or Reddit comments complaining about metric units.

dang 5y ago

You started a hell of a flamewar with this, and you contributed to perpetuating it too. That's totally not cool here. Please follow the site guidelines, which include: "Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28448249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28448249 and marked it off topic.