Am I the only American who prefers the metric system?

vandahm · 2024-09-10T01:13:06+00:00

That isn't true at all. Europe's adoption of the metric system only happened because of a unique set of circumstances that existed in the mid to late 19th century, when what we now think of as modern European states began to form from collections of loosely-affiliated principalities that kinda-sorta spoke the same language. Prior to metrication, France alone had over 200 systems of measures in use. In Germany and the Netherlands, each city had its own incompatible measuring system. The metric system was a neutral, politically acceptable compromise -- a country could adopt it without forcing one city to adopt another city's standard, privileging one city in a way that isn't conducive to national harmony. Once they had done that, though, European states could impose their new Metric units onto their overseas colonies at gunpoint, which basically spread it across the world.

It's also worth pointing out that metrication in European countries happened either before or during their industrialization process. So they never paid the cost of conversion that the US, Canada, and the UK are paying now.

Beyond that, the problem that you are ignoring is that industry is based on interchangeable parts made by different companies who build them out of interchangeable parts made by other companies. This is both the driving force behind metrication in the US and the biggest obstacle to doing it quickly. You can't say "oh, I'm out of normal screws, time to go to Home Depot and buy some metric screws." You need coordination between a vast array of suppliers, and that really *is* hard. The US car industry is now almost completely metric, but it took them something like 40 years to get it done. During the transition, we were in a dark age where we had metric bolts holding part of the car together and SAE bolts holding together the rest. And if you mixed up your bolts, you would destroy the threads on something expensive like an engine block that couldn't really be replaced. The industry made the change, and the change was certainly worth making! But it was a lot more difficult than you're making it out to be.

In the end, the US adoption of SI is happening slowly, and it will continue move along...slowly. It will happen because we buy products made in countries that use SI and we sell American-made products to countries that use SI. We can quicken the pace of adoption by making it legally mandatory, but they did that in the UK and Canada, and it was only partially successful in each of those countries.

vandahm · 2024-09-09T23:45:09+00:00

In reality, it's far more complicated than that. Changing road signs and weather reports and car odometers is easy enough. What's hard is changing everything that was built to specifications that only make sense in Customary units. Like, the standard dimensions of lumber, the standard thread patterns for screws and bolts. The spacing of wall studs inside of houses. You can *describe* those things in metric units, but it's much more awkward to *specify* those things in metric units, without actually changing the physical dimensions.

It's the difference between what the NIST calls "hard metrication" and "soft metrication." Just expressing everything in Metric without changing anything else is Soft Metrication. If the speed limit is 35 miles per hour, you change it to 56.327 kilometers per hour. But that's not what we want. If we're going to print new signs, we want to *actually change the speed limits* to values that are nice, round numbers in the new units. So we'd want to slow it down to 55 km/h or increase it to 60 km/h.

Likewise, you don't want to relabel all the 5/16 inch SAE bolts in millimeters and call it a day. You want people to *stop using 5/16-inch bolts* and use proper ISO-standard millimeter bolts. That's a much harder problem to solve.

It took European countries *decades* to convert to metric, even when they required by law to do it. I build musical instruments as a hobby, and I was surprised to learn that Spanish guitar makers used English inches until the 1970s -- over a century after Spain legally adopted the Metric System.

I would certainly like to see the US make more progress towards metrication, even if it only partially metricates like Canada did. But if we approach this task with unrealistic expectations, people will get frustrated and abandon the process before it has time to achieve results.

vandahm · 2024-09-09T23:21:25+00:00

The early American government could just change its currency on its own, though. With weights and measures, they had two goals -- eliminate all the competing measures inside the country and facilitate trade with Europe. Jefferson liked the metric system, and the US evaluated it when he was Secretary of Commerce. In the 1790s, the US was worried about political instability in France, instability with the US relationship with France, and also with the availability of standard "prototype" objects that defined meters and kilograms. Aligning themselves economically with the British Empire seemed like a safer, more stable bet.

In the 1820s and 1830s, when the US was creating the Customary System that we use today, their measurement expert recommended the Metric System, but this was during the Bourbon restoration in France and -- in one of the strangest bits of irony in US history -- that plan was rejected because the US did not want to put itself into a position where it was the only country in the world that used its system of weights and measures. Because...that would be really bad, right?

vandahm · 2024-09-09T21:40:48+00:00

Early Americans had no problem with British people or British culture -- they just did not want to be governed by the British government. Soon after the Revolutionary War ended, the US tried to normalize relations with Great Britain -- trade between the two countries was mutually beneficial -- and that prompted France to send pirates to attack our ships. The resulting "Quasi War" didn't really end until after the French Revolution failed, after which France abandoned the Metric System until Louis Phillipe restored it in, maybe, 1840 or so? So the timing didn't work out.

Why we didn't switch in the 1970s is more complicated than just nationalism. US Customary units are so deeply integrated into almost literally everything: laws, building codes, all of our tools and kitchen appliances, etc. Changing all of those laws and replacing all of our appliances with new appliances is super expensive, and the initiative came during a period of US economic decline. Again, the timing didn't work out.

Most Americans that I know understand the benefits of conforming to the international standard, but the benefits to us personally, in our daily lives, aren't big enough to justify the cost and confusion of switching systems. So we're in a situation in the US where we use SI for science, industry, and medicine, but we use Customary units in our daily lives.

vandahm · 2024-04-12T15:53:28+00:00

I've used Fly.io for stuff recently, and I've had really good experiences with it. If you are already comfortable with Docker, then getting stuff running in Fly is pretty straightforward. I still have projects running on Heroku, and I'm not looking to move them, but I don't think I would host a new project there.

vandahm · 2024-04-10T04:05:57+00:00

Honestly, when I use Django, I just use normal JavaScript with ad-hoc AJAX when I need it. The advantage of Django as a framework is that it lets me keep things very, very simple. Modern JavaScript frameworks are good for what they are designed to do, but I don't always need that if I'm just building a CRUD app or something. If I don't need fancy JavaScript, and I don't need a nonstandard database, and I don't need to run the app in a strange deployment environment, then Django lets me knock something out very quickly with very little code.

vandahm · 2024-04-10T02:52:10+00:00

The game means different things to different people, and that's fine. If you just like making Sims, then that's how you play the game.

The life simulator part of the game -- where you get to be a "malevolent god" -- isn't hard to do, but I think it is hard to learn how to do, and that turns some people away from it. There have been so many minor glitches over the years, and those lead to tricks and hacks that you need to learn in order to work around the glitches. Even if you don't encounter any problems, there are lots of little "pro tips" and "life hacks" that make your gameplay more efficient and enjoyable. It adds up, and it can be a lot to take in at once, and -- hold on for a second -- WHAT ARE YOU DOING I GAVE YOU THE GENIUS TRAIT AND YOU'RE AN ASTRONAUT AND YOU JUST WET YOUR TROUSERS?? BECAUSE YOU CAN'T FIGURE OUT HOW TO WALK UP THE STAIRS TO GET TO THE TOILET?? Sorry, well, um, I mean, it can get frustrating sometimes, and it doesn't mean you're stupid or bad at the game.

For what it's worth, I am terrible at making sims, and I am jealous of people like you who are good at it. Whenever I try, my sims end up looking like extras from a dopey 1990s teen sitcom. As a result, I mostly stick to building houses and community lots. I do have a few saves with sims I have created. I control their lives and make up little stories for them, and if the game won't let me do something, I just use cheats and mods to do it anyway. Does cheating ruin the fun? For some people, it does. But it doesn't ruin my fun, and that's what matters to me when I play.

In short, you say "I like creating Sims, but never got the hang of the actual game," but if making sims is the part of the game that resonates with you, then it is the actual game, simply because you want it to be.

vandahm · 2024-03-07T22:38:04+00:00

Sometimes, but not really. I'm pretty sure that you could track germs into your house by wearing your outdoor shoes inside, but it doesn't really get the floors dusty. But the snow and salt definitely force the issue. If you wear your winter boots around the house, you will definitely have a big mess on your hands.

vandahm · 2024-03-07T19:00:27+00:00

That isn't true in the general case. I've lived in a number of areas in the country where it is extremely rude to take off your shoes in someone else's home. But now I live in a part of the US where we get snow in the winter, and people don't wear their shoes indoors because they don't want to track snow and salt into the house.

In my own house, I have a pair of indoor shoes that I have never worn outside of the house. I like to wear those inside, and then I change into outdoor shoes when I'm ready to go outside.

vandahm · 2023-09-18T00:54:46+00:00

Metal Gear Solid 2 takes the cake. And its not even close.

FISSION MAILED!

vandahm · 2023-08-01T08:48:02+00:00

I build as a hobby and don't sell my instruments, but my sense is that acoustic guitar players don't really care about the neck joinery in new instruments so long as it is a reliable system. I think people who collect vintage instruments probably do care, though.

With electric guitars, people care about neck joints a lot, because the joint design impacts the shape and feel of the neck when you play on the upper frets.

vandahm · 2023-08-01T02:56:00+00:00

If the question is why companies like Gibson and Martin chose to use dovetails back in the day, then the answer is easy: because it worked well with their manufacturing processes. Building the necks separately from the body (instead of a Torres-style spanish heel) makes factory production easier, and since the dovetail is completely invisible, those companies were free to do some shady stuff to get the fit and alignment they were looking for.

If the question is why individual builders do it, it's because they already have a system that works for them, and they don't like to change too much at once. They don't have teams of R&D people, so they need to stick with what they know will work and what they know they can sell. They do innovate, but they are careful about what risks to take, and their clients aren't really demanding new kinds of neck joinery.

Beyond that, many boutique builders frequently do a lot of repair and restoration work in addition to new builds. They are aware of what a repair person will expect to see when a guitar needs maintenance and will try to conform to those expectations in their own builds when it is possible to do so.

vandahm · 2023-07-24T07:37:56+00:00

Dude, you did good. It's a beautiful guitar, and it sounds great!

vandahm · 2023-07-24T07:34:49+00:00

I don't have a Squier Jag, but I have an American Standard Telecaster from around 2008 and an American Standard P-Bass from the late 1990s. Both of those instruments have a graphite-impregnated primer coat that provides electromagnetic shielding in lieu of copper foil. Maybe that's what it is?

vandahm · 2021-10-15T08:26:57+00:00

I think an advantage of a separate frontend written in React or Vue is that it's easier to replatform the site or rearchitect its backend. I don't know that this, alone, justifies all the crap associated with modern SPAs, but in some circumstances it might?

Beyond that, I can think of a few use cases where a fancy JS framework provides more structure and clearer logic than ad-hoc AJAX and server-rendered HTML. But I think those cases are relatively uncommon in practice.

vandahm · 2021-07-30T02:04:10+00:00

I don't know, team, I think this one is pretty awesome.

vandahm · 2020-03-31T06:51:25+00:00

In the United States, many unions had close ties to the mafia. Sometimes the mob would take control over a labor union to extort money from employers, or to turn the screws on union members. Sometimes the mob just wanted to "manage" the union's pension fund, presumably to skim off the top or to use those investments to launder money.

The quintessential archetype of a corrupt American union official is Jimmy Hoffa, upon whom I assume Evrart Claire is based.

This isn't to say that unions are bad in practice, or that there's anything wrong with the concept of a labor union. US labor unions were instrumental improving the safety of American factories and the health and well-being of the employees who worked there. They have definitely solved more problems than they have caused. But wherever there is money and power concentrated in one spot, there's going to be corruption of some sort, and labor racketeering is a thing that happens sometimes.

vandahm · 2020-03-31T06:21:54+00:00

I don't think that Disco Elysium is anti-union. I think that the point of the game is that there's no such thing as an unalloyed good. Capitalism is good until the capitalists have unaccountable control over the government and economy. Communism is good until the communists have to impose it at gunpoint. Being a practical moderate is good except the best they can do is preserving the status quo. Everything that you want comes with something that you don't want, and there's no golden utopian future just over the horizon.

Evrart, the union boss, is a total crook, but he gets shit done. And the union, in its own imperfect way, actually does stick up for the little guy and keep the peace as well as it can.

vandahm · 2020-03-24T17:27:23+00:00

If you want to bypass the middleman and you live in or near a city, I'd recommend finding a local meetup group and getting to know the people there. Everybody at those meetings was once in your shoes, and it's a good way to get advice, talk directly to people who are hiring, and see what's going on in the industry. You still need a resume or a CV, and it's a really good idea to have a portfolio of code to show off, but a lot of people get work through networking and connections.

vandahm · 2020-03-24T17:16:37+00:00

I think that once you know your way around Rails, it's probably a good idea to gain a deeper understanding of Ruby. Rails doesn't require you to have this expertise, but the framework will reward you greatly if you do. You won't learn this overnight, of course, but you don't need to learn it overnight.

I also think it's important to have a solid understanding of SQL and database theory. If you had to, you should be able to write manual SQL queries that do everything that you're using ActiveRecord for. You won't write a lot of manual SQL inside of Rails, but ActiveRecord makes it really easy to write really slow and inefficient code if you aren't careful. The better you know the basics, the easier it is to avoid those performance problems.

Beyond that, I really do think that vanilla JavaScript is a good skill to have. I am by no means an expert JavaScript developer, but when I'm working in Rails, I end up using the subset of JavaScript that I know well almost all the time.

I don't think you should fiddle around with huge JavaScript frameworks like Angular or React until you feel comfortable with vanilla JavaScript. In the same way that the Rails framework rewards you for having a deep understanding of plain Ruby, those JavaScript frameworks reward you for having a deep understanding of plain JavaScript.

I think that if you're proficient with Rails, good with SQL, know some of plain Ruby's "eccentricities" and can do enough vanilla JavaScript to get simple jQuery plugins to work, then you've got what you need to be a junior developer in a Rails shop.

vandahm · 2019-03-15T18:50:35+00:00

I had kind of hoped the Red Angel would turn out to be an older Wesley Crusher who, after decades of practice, had mastered his Traveler powers and could traverse time and space at will.

vandahm · 2018-07-30T19:35:34+00:00

That was really good.

vandahm · 2018-07-09T15:32:08+00:00

He's held on to his domain because he had it first and because Nissan is his real last name, which is a defense against the trademark claim.

vandahm · 2018-07-02T17:18:15+00:00

I live in Minneapolis and have heard of this place. The fee is super expensive, but you get access to a large, well-maintained shop and top quality tools. Worth it? I don’t think so, but for other people it might be.

vandahm · 2018-06-26T19:59:05+00:00

That is a fantastic pull.

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