It's not for your day to day life that you convert; it's for business and trade. So much duplicated effort and frustration dealing with two, incompatible systems of measurement.
Also, "assuming you're an American", you still travel, right? Wouldn't it be nice not to have to deal with unit confusion every time you do?
Exactly. The rest of the world wants you to change to metric not because it's better (although, I think it is), but simply so everyone's using the same standard.
If everyone was using imperial and the US was alone in using metric, I'd be supporting the opposite. As it stands, travelling to the US is like entering some alternate, confusing world at the moment (and the same for Americans travelling elsewhere). Doing business with Americans is a pain - not just in the obvious ways with regards to needing to convert units, but other things. Like paper size. Getting sent documents made for 'letter' paper which don't look right when you print them on A4. Or worse, being physically mailed documents in US paper sizes that refuse to fit into any binders/plastic sleeves/etc that you have available. Gah! Not to mention all the effort that has to go into putting both measurement systems into software - wouldn't getting rid of all that duplicate effort and code be nice?
Yep, I'm so glad we do have a couple of 'good guy' ISPs in this country. iiNet being one and Internode (which of course is now owned by iiNet, but still operates as a separate concern) being the other. They're both run by geeks who think in much the same way as we do, and it shows.
Sadly I'm moving to the US next year where instead of having 30+ ISPs, some of which are genuinely 'good' to choose from, I'll have 2 or 3 choices at most, all equally evil.
Yes that sentence in the summary seemed weird. They may be newish in the ~smartphone~ market but they've been selling 3G/4G USB dongles (ZTE, though often re-branded by the telco selling them) and mobile phone infrastructure (Huawei, towers, relays, routers and the like) for a long time, including in Western countries.
Take a look at any dongles or pocket wifi things you've got floating around. There's a good chance it's actually a ZTE device.
Sorry, I was responding to the general assertion that data plans are more pricey than minutes, saying that it's not true for everyone. But in case it wasn't clear, I didn't mean Canada specifically. I'm in Australia, FWIW.
You jest, but for a lot of people, data is a lot cheaper than voice minutes. I chose my current low end plan ($20/month) has only a relatively small number of minutes (since I'm not a heavy phone user) but 1.5 GB of data per month. 1.5 GB is LOT of VoIP time. I make Skype or Facetime voice calls from my phone far more often than I make actual phone network calls.
Not only that I can bolt on additional gigs of data for just $5 or $10 extra a month, which gets me a lot more than a $5/$10 more expensive voice plan would get me.
Well I don't know "why", but many ISPs around here offer or are starting to offer IPv6. None are thinking about doing carrier-grade NAT (with the exception of some of the cheaper mobile phone networks, and frankly, I don't really have a problem with it for phones... not like I'm running a server on my phone, plus you can usually pay a nominal sum for a 'real' IP if required).
People want real IPs and any decent ISP will offer them. Simpler to administer for them, and not really much of a cost - they just make sure they always buy IPv6-compatible hardware and software over the course of their normal upgrade cycle, and eventually they will be able to offer IPv6.
Heh, my ISP offers a "semi-static"/56 currently to IPv6 clients. "Semi" static in that, while it hasn't changed yet after over a year of use, they offer no guarantees they won't change something in the future that makes it dynamic:)
"Similarly, no one has to teach someone that a foot measures about a foot, but you had to memorize that your hand spans about 10cm. There are numerous other examples of U.S. customary units being derived from everyday objects..."
Yep, agreed. Though who on earth has a foot that's actually a foot long... them's some giant feet!
"0-100 is a familiar spectrum regardless of which system you use, but where U.S. customary system uses it to represent how hot or cold the temperatures that we can reasonably expect to encounter over the course of our lives feel to us, S.I. uses it to represent when water changes state. Both are relatable, but the former is much more directly relatable. Likewise, temperatures above 100F/40C tend to lose meaning to us, since they're simply hotter than we can reasonably bear, and "100" has a much greater sense of finality to it than "40" does, which makes sense, given that that's about where we stop caring about how hot something is in our everyday lives and simply define it as "too hot"."
Funnily enough, here in Australia, many people use similar logic to justify use of degrees C. 0 C, or slightly below, is about as cold as most are ever likely to encounter here, so it has that 'finality' that you mention for 100 F on the 'hot' end of the spectrum. And 100 (or 40 C for that matter) isn't a good 'final-ish' temperature here as it is common, even regular, for temps to well exceed that in Australia in summer (as it is in many places of the US, e.g. Nevada and other south-western states).
I don't think like that though as I live in one of the few places in Australia where sub-freezing temperatures are common, and have also lived in a colder part of the US for a period, where 0 C would be considered a very warm day in winter and where you go well into the negative-double-digit temps as measured in either scale. I recognise that the above paragraph represents a product of Australia's hot and dry climate. Obviously Asia and Europe get significantly colder and still use Celsius, which I agree is less intuitive in that kind of climate than the 0-100 F scale.
End of the day I just wish everyone used the same system, even if that system isn't perfect. I think what irritates the rest of the world about the US measurement system is more a matter of "gah, why can't they be ~consistent~ with everyone else" rather than "why can't they use the metric system (specifically)". I think we'd have the same feeling if the US used metric and everyone else used some other system...:) The result would be the same - every time I visit the US it's like I've stepped into some alien world where everything is different for no good reason (this applies to MANY things other than measurement systems - the US just seems to dislike 'standards' in general)
Well, I'm Australian and I can say it's pure metric here, and in NZ, and in every Asian country I've ever been in. Also in some other countries a lot of people might use a weird mix day to day but ~officially~ things are metric. That's what I'm talking about - the official units you see on signs and on TV etc.
The older generations (e.g. my parents) here in Australia colloquially use stones for their weight too (like in the UK). But they'd at least have a vague idea of what it was in kg too, given they've been immersed in metric for the last 40 years.
"I still don't understand. Why gold? Why not platinum? Why not pieces of slate? I like slate, I'd rather have a slate bed to my snooker table than a gold one."
While I don't disagree with your post, IF you are going to base a currency on a standard commodity (IF), the reason you pick gold is that:
- It's rare and requires industrial-scale effort obtain and refine (can't use slate, it's too common, otherwise people could just chip away at rocks around their neighbourhood to make money)
- It's stable (this rules out organic material like wheat and many other things that degrade, corrode or rot etc.)
- It doesn't have other uses in which it is consumed, that would compete with its function as a store of value (platinum for instance, has significant industrial uses, while gold doesn't... gold is used in jewellery admittedly but isn't consumed in the process). Having said that platinum wouldn't be a terrible choice as it's stable and rare. It's one of the four precious metals that has a currency code (the others being gold, silver and palladium).
Anyway that's why you'd use gold (or another precious metal) as opposed to other physical objects. Civilisations throughout history have reached the same conclusion.
But like you say, it's easier just to use a piece of paper or electronic record. I don't have an issue with fiat money if it's well managed. Like you say, it's just a record that I have done some work that society finds valuable, which I can use to exchange for other work or goods. There's no inherent reason that the counters/tokens themselves need to have value......unless the system is abused or badly managed. I don't like the idea that the work I do now (or rather, the tokens of having done that work sitting in my bank account) loses value over time or can be arbitrarily rendered worthless overnight if there's a complete collapse/hyperinflation. The fiat system is great when it works. And most of the time, it does. But humans are fallible and catastrophes occur. And if the fiat system fails you'd be glad that your tokens also had some inherent value, and all that work you did is not now wiped out and made worthless. Not that I think this is likely to occur - I'm no doomsday nutjob. But I can see that side of the argument.
BTW I concede that gold doesn't really have 'inherent value' and it too only has value because we say it does. In practice oil or food and land have actual usefulness that gold does not. But they are unsuitable for the other reasons mentioned above and it's probably safe to say that gold will always be valuable to humans due to rarity and beauty, if nothing else.
Sounds very sensible to me. Raising gas taxes gradually will:
- Minimise disruption to life and allow people to gradually convert to more efficient vehicles; - Encourage R&D into alternative technologies, which WILL be needed sooner or later, as well as potentially resulting in a new industry America can dominate in; - Lead to higher tax revenues, hopefully doing at least a tiny bit to help with the obscene debt the nation is in.
Seriously what's the problem here? The US currently has some of the lowest gas prices (i.e. lowest gasoline taxation rates) of any OECD nation and has ample scope to benefit from raising them gradually, without things becoming too disruptive for the population.
Yeah I'm pretty sure that most of Canada has to deal with snow more than 2 months of the year. Hell here in AUSTRALIA (sunny! hot! dry!) snow falls for more months than that on the higher ground.
Yes we here in Australia are cursing the weak US dollar, as it makes our own dollar very strong (has been worth slightly more than the US dollar for a few years now), even though traditionally it's only been worth 70-80 US cents. This really hurts our manufacturing and export sectors, and also, importantly, tourism, which is a huge industry in Australia. Americans now reject the idea of vacationing here because using their weak dollar, the prices seem outrageous here (and I don't blame them). 10 years ago the USD:AUD was more than DOUBLE what it is now. Combined with inflation this means that an American would be paying (in USD terms) almost triple what they would have in 2001 for the same Australian trip (except for airfares, which are presumably bought from an American airline and thus paid in USD).
OTOH the weak USD/strong AUD has made it very attractive for Australians to visit (and shop in) the US. Apparently Australians are now the one of the most common incoming passenger nationalities into California (impressive considering our small population). For shopping sprees worth over a few thousand, it's cheaper to fly to the US, buy everything, and fly back, than it is to shop locally, because the weak USD makes US prices look ridiculously cheap to us now (a decade ago they were roughly on-par).
Having said all that - the USD is unique, being the global reserve currency. While I would normally agree with you that "weak currencies... don't inspire confidence in other countries to keep them", I think the USD is the exception to that rule. Being the reserve currency, there really is no choice but to keep USD. It's still (somehow, amazingly) seen as stable and risk free. Unlike say, when the AUD gets weak (it's strong now and a very popular currency to hold given that cash interest rates here are still 3+%, compared with close to zero elsewhere, but it will be abandoned in a split second as soon as there's a hint of weakness - it's still seen as risky despite our AAA credit rating etc...we just aren't a big or diverse enough economy)
It's not strictly "too much land, not enough people". Australia has the same huge amount of land and vastly fewer people to fill it, yet has on the whole better mass transit than the US. The difference is that the population is more centralised in Australia (more highly concentrated in the cities, rather than the eleventy billion small towns you get across the US).
So the 'problem' (I wouldn't call it a problem, just a difference in settlement patterns) with America is "lots of land, people more evenly scattered across it", rather than simply not enough people. In fact with well over 300M people and with birth rates higher than almost any other developed country, you may have an overpopulation problem in the not-too-distant future.
Australia here - we pay more than the US but less than Europe. I don't mind it that way - gives me some incentive to save fuel where possible (which benefits everyone) and I know that the difference in price is primarily taxes, which go towards maintaining the roads. I've driven a lot in the US and Australia and from my experience the road infrastructure in cities is better maintained in Australia than in the US, but the reverse in rural/remote areas (a lot of rural highways in Australia are narrow and in pretty poor condition, mostly due to the ridiculously low population density/tax base in rural Australia compared to the US).
Australia is "as big" as the US (physical size, not population) and my phone plan is $20 a month. 1.5 GB of data and more voice time/SMS than I'll ever use. And national coverage of course (within the same country has never even been called 'roaming' here, it's always been completely normal and assumed that a phone/plan works the same anywhere in the country).
Having said that, that doesn't include a subsidized phone - I bought the phone outright because I hate contracts. So the cost of the phone is an additional be a $200-$800 one-off cost depending on what model of phone you get. Still over 2+ years, it works out way cheaper this way. Even our "free/subsidised phone and 2-year contract" plans are way less than $100 or $80 though. So I guess yeah, the US is expensive for phones.
That's OK though, you guys get almost everything ELSE cheaper than we do:) (Clothing, fuel, software/music/movies, etc.)
It's interesting that you mention the 'relatability' of units. I wonder if this, too, is purely a product of upbringing and experience. I can't relate at all to feet and pounds and inches etc. I grew up and still am completely metric (in Australia). And I simply have my own 'body part visualisations'. Pinky finger width as you mention is a cm. but my hand width at its widest point (fingers together) is exactly 10 cm. And a metre is a walking pace stride (much like a yard would be). So I have my 1/10/100 cm approximations and that's all you really need.
For weight and volume, I just think of a 1 litre soda bottle. That is 1 L but it also weighs 1 kg. Or 2 L / 2 kg for a 2 L bottle if that's easier. Oh and we still use cups for cooking in metric - it's actually 250 mL, but roughly fits in a cup or mug just like the old 'cups'.
Similarly for temperature, I think what 'sounds' right is a product of upbringing. Fahrenheit temps just sound so ridiculously huge to a Celsius-only brain. -20 is frigid (like 0 F, which is pretty close)' -10 is rather cold, 0 is freezing point, 10 is cool, 20 is room temp, 30 is hot, 40 is HOT (40 C acts like the de facto '100 F' in metric countries - the temp that the news will make a big deal about if it gets there).
Anyway, simply wanted to add a bit on the idea of 'relatability' of units from a purely metric brain. I think if you are brought up on ANY system, you will find ways to approximate it pretty well for day to day use.
It's not a matter of forcing, but seriously, the US is the last holdout. It's a pain for every industry that has to deal with the US, or US industries that have to deal with other places. It adds a layer of duplication or redundant effort to everything that needs to operate in the international market. That'd be fine if half the world was using one system and half the world the other. But it's just one last country, stubbornly holding on to their system for what at times seems no good reason other than just 'to be special'. The rest of us just want to consign traditional units to history and be done with it, but we can't while a major market like the US still uses them. I'd love to actually be able to print a document sent to me from America without having to go and change the paper size and deal with all the pagination issues that result. I'd love not having to change my ruler in MS Word from inches to cm every time I install it. And I'm sure programmers of all software would love not having to waste their time programming two sets of measurements into everything so it can be used in all markets.
Also, it's confusing for travellers (seriously, the US unit system baffles most visitors and results in American tourists overseas looking like idiots and loudly demanding to know what things are in their own units). A minor quibble perhaps but it does perpetuate a negative stereotype of Americans that doesn't do anyone any favours.
Don't get me wrong, I am no anti-American. Half my family (including my wife) is American and I enjoy spending time in your country. But everyone scratches their head at the lack of progress on metrication. Again, it's not that we want to force a change. Its just that the job, globally, is almost done, except for one last place. Drawing on the experience of every other country that has successfully changed, they should be able to do it easily and without major issues. But still don't, despite the benefits to the nation as a whole (note that as you say, there are few benefits in day to day personal life - the benefits are more societal and in industry). The conclusion in some people's mind therefore is that the US behaves this way just to piss everyone else off and be different.
Land gridded up like that using miles or some multiple of miles as a unit is common in Australia too, but they converted fully to metric in the 60s. The standard land parcel just becomes some number of hectares instead, of which there are 100 per square kilometre. It works fine.
The only time you get an inkling of the history behind this is when you realise while driving around "hey, these side roads seem to occur exactly every 1.6 km... interesting".
The point I'm making is that every other country converted (almost... there's a few weird holdouts like the UK still using miles for road distances) and didn't fall apart. And Australia is probably the most similar place to the US to use as a case study (both huge, both with Federal-State-local government system, both English speaking and with similar traditions of splitting up land etc, both with massive and often isolated highway systems with huge amounts of signage to change). No one is saying it's an utterly trouble free process, but really, it went pretty smoothly and any minor teething problems were sorted out long ago. My parents lived through the conversion and say it really wasn't a big deal at all.
To me, MMO implies a single, persistent world with many thousands of players. The 'massive' refers to the number of players, not the world size - Massively Multiplayer Online game.
Depends on the jurisdiction. Some states ban them outright. Others allow them on specific days in the year (which doesn't normally include New Years... e.g. they were legal in the ACT on the Queen's Birthday weekend up until a couple of years ago, now I think they are banned outright there too - too many complaints from pet owners and people who had idiots blow up their mailbox with them etc.)
But that aside, on New Years (which was yesterday here... I'm in Australia) my wife and I went into the CBD of my city for the fireworks at 9pm, but didn't hang around until the midnight ones as the city events are all alcohol-free and we wanted our midnight champagne. Went home, opened a bottle at midnight, watched the other fireworks on TV. Boring but pleasant:)
Um, not even close. Voyager is currently just under 0.002 light years away. Two one-thousandths of a light year.
Which of course makes your point even more pertinent. 12 light years, or even 1 light year, may as well be infinity.
(When you said it was only 0.17 ly away I was like "what, seriously? That's actually pretty good!". Then I realised that can't be right, as I know the DSN isn't waiting anywhere near 0.17 years for signals from Voyager.)
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It's not for your day to day life that you convert; it's for business and trade. So much duplicated effort and frustration dealing with two, incompatible systems of measurement.
Also, "assuming you're an American", you still travel, right? Wouldn't it be nice not to have to deal with unit confusion every time you do?
Exactly. The rest of the world wants you to change to metric not because it's better (although, I think it is), but simply so everyone's using the same standard.
If everyone was using imperial and the US was alone in using metric, I'd be supporting the opposite. As it stands, travelling to the US is like entering some alternate, confusing world at the moment (and the same for Americans travelling elsewhere). Doing business with Americans is a pain - not just in the obvious ways with regards to needing to convert units, but other things. Like paper size. Getting sent documents made for 'letter' paper which don't look right when you print them on A4. Or worse, being physically mailed documents in US paper sizes that refuse to fit into any binders/plastic sleeves/etc that you have available. Gah! Not to mention all the effort that has to go into putting both measurement systems into software - wouldn't getting rid of all that duplicate effort and code be nice?
Yep, I'm so glad we do have a couple of 'good guy' ISPs in this country. iiNet being one and Internode (which of course is now owned by iiNet, but still operates as a separate concern) being the other. They're both run by geeks who think in much the same way as we do, and it shows.
Sadly I'm moving to the US next year where instead of having 30+ ISPs, some of which are genuinely 'good' to choose from, I'll have 2 or 3 choices at most, all equally evil.
Yes that sentence in the summary seemed weird. They may be newish in the ~smartphone~ market but they've been selling 3G/4G USB dongles (ZTE, though often re-branded by the telco selling them) and mobile phone infrastructure (Huawei, towers, relays, routers and the like) for a long time, including in Western countries.
Take a look at any dongles or pocket wifi things you've got floating around. There's a good chance it's actually a ZTE device.
Sorry, I was responding to the general assertion that data plans are more pricey than minutes, saying that it's not true for everyone. But in case it wasn't clear, I didn't mean Canada specifically. I'm in Australia, FWIW.
You jest, but for a lot of people, data is a lot cheaper than voice minutes. I chose my current low end plan ($20/month) has only a relatively small number of minutes (since I'm not a heavy phone user) but 1.5 GB of data per month. 1.5 GB is LOT of VoIP time. I make Skype or Facetime voice calls from my phone far more often than I make actual phone network calls.
Not only that I can bolt on additional gigs of data for just $5 or $10 extra a month, which gets me a lot more than a $5/$10 more expensive voice plan would get me.
Well I don't know "why", but many ISPs around here offer or are starting to offer IPv6. None are thinking about doing carrier-grade NAT (with the exception of some of the cheaper mobile phone networks, and frankly, I don't really have a problem with it for phones ... not like I'm running a server on my phone, plus you can usually pay a nominal sum for a 'real' IP if required).
People want real IPs and any decent ISP will offer them. Simpler to administer for them, and not really much of a cost - they just make sure they always buy IPv6-compatible hardware and software over the course of their normal upgrade cycle, and eventually they will be able to offer IPv6.
Heh, my ISP offers a "semi-static" /56 currently to IPv6 clients. "Semi" static in that, while it hasn't changed yet after over a year of use, they offer no guarantees they won't change something in the future that makes it dynamic :)
Yeah fair enough. Some random thoughts:
"Similarly, no one has to teach someone that a foot measures about a foot, but you had to memorize that your hand spans about 10cm. There are numerous other examples of U.S. customary units being derived from everyday objects..."
Yep, agreed. Though who on earth has a foot that's actually a foot long ... them's some giant feet!
"0-100 is a familiar spectrum regardless of which system you use, but where U.S. customary system uses it to represent how hot or cold the temperatures that we can reasonably expect to encounter over the course of our lives feel to us, S.I. uses it to represent when water changes state. Both are relatable, but the former is much more directly relatable. Likewise, temperatures above 100F/40C tend to lose meaning to us, since they're simply hotter than we can reasonably bear, and "100" has a much greater sense of finality to it than "40" does, which makes sense, given that that's about where we stop caring about how hot something is in our everyday lives and simply define it as "too hot"."
Funnily enough, here in Australia, many people use similar logic to justify use of degrees C. 0 C, or slightly below, is about as cold as most are ever likely to encounter here, so it has that 'finality' that you mention for 100 F on the 'hot' end of the spectrum. And 100 (or 40 C for that matter) isn't a good 'final-ish' temperature here as it is common, even regular, for temps to well exceed that in Australia in summer (as it is in many places of the US, e.g. Nevada and other south-western states).
I don't think like that though as I live in one of the few places in Australia where sub-freezing temperatures are common, and have also lived in a colder part of the US for a period, where 0 C would be considered a very warm day in winter and where you go well into the negative-double-digit temps as measured in either scale. I recognise that the above paragraph represents a product of Australia's hot and dry climate. Obviously Asia and Europe get significantly colder and still use Celsius, which I agree is less intuitive in that kind of climate than the 0-100 F scale.
End of the day I just wish everyone used the same system, even if that system isn't perfect. I think what irritates the rest of the world about the US measurement system is more a matter of "gah, why can't they be ~consistent~ with everyone else" rather than "why can't they use the metric system (specifically)". I think we'd have the same feeling if the US used metric and everyone else used some other system... :) The result would be the same - every time I visit the US it's like I've stepped into some alien world where everything is different for no good reason (this applies to MANY things other than measurement systems - the US just seems to dislike 'standards' in general)
Well, I'm Australian and I can say it's pure metric here, and in NZ, and in every Asian country I've ever been in. Also in some other countries a lot of people might use a weird mix day to day but ~officially~ things are metric. That's what I'm talking about - the official units you see on signs and on TV etc.
The older generations (e.g. my parents) here in Australia colloquially use stones for their weight too (like in the UK). But they'd at least have a vague idea of what it was in kg too, given they've been immersed in metric for the last 40 years.
"I still don't understand. Why gold? Why not platinum? Why not pieces of slate? I like slate, I'd rather have a slate bed to my snooker table than a gold one."
While I don't disagree with your post, IF you are going to base a currency on a standard commodity (IF), the reason you pick gold is that:
- It's rare and requires industrial-scale effort obtain and refine (can't use slate, it's too common, otherwise people could just chip away at rocks around their neighbourhood to make money)
- It's stable (this rules out organic material like wheat and many other things that degrade, corrode or rot etc.)
- It doesn't have other uses in which it is consumed, that would compete with its function as a store of value (platinum for instance, has significant industrial uses, while gold doesn't ... gold is used in jewellery admittedly but isn't consumed in the process). Having said that platinum wouldn't be a terrible choice as it's stable and rare. It's one of the four precious metals that has a currency code (the others being gold, silver and palladium).
Anyway that's why you'd use gold (or another precious metal) as opposed to other physical objects. Civilisations throughout history have reached the same conclusion.
But like you say, it's easier just to use a piece of paper or electronic record. I don't have an issue with fiat money if it's well managed. Like you say, it's just a record that I have done some work that society finds valuable, which I can use to exchange for other work or goods. There's no inherent reason that the counters/tokens themselves need to have value... ...unless the system is abused or badly managed. I don't like the idea that the work I do now (or rather, the tokens of having done that work sitting in my bank account) loses value over time or can be arbitrarily rendered worthless overnight if there's a complete collapse/hyperinflation. The fiat system is great when it works. And most of the time, it does. But humans are fallible and catastrophes occur. And if the fiat system fails you'd be glad that your tokens also had some inherent value, and all that work you did is not now wiped out and made worthless. Not that I think this is likely to occur - I'm no doomsday nutjob. But I can see that side of the argument.
BTW I concede that gold doesn't really have 'inherent value' and it too only has value because we say it does. In practice oil or food and land have actual usefulness that gold does not. But they are unsuitable for the other reasons mentioned above and it's probably safe to say that gold will always be valuable to humans due to rarity and beauty, if nothing else.
Sounds very sensible to me. Raising gas taxes gradually will:
- Minimise disruption to life and allow people to gradually convert to more efficient vehicles;
- Encourage R&D into alternative technologies, which WILL be needed sooner or later, as well as potentially resulting in a new industry America can dominate in;
- Lead to higher tax revenues, hopefully doing at least a tiny bit to help with the obscene debt the nation is in.
Seriously what's the problem here? The US currently has some of the lowest gas prices (i.e. lowest gasoline taxation rates) of any OECD nation and has ample scope to benefit from raising them gradually, without things becoming too disruptive for the population.
Yeah I'm pretty sure that most of Canada has to deal with snow more than 2 months of the year. Hell here in AUSTRALIA (sunny! hot! dry!) snow falls for more months than that on the higher ground.
Yes we here in Australia are cursing the weak US dollar, as it makes our own dollar very strong (has been worth slightly more than the US dollar for a few years now), even though traditionally it's only been worth 70-80 US cents. This really hurts our manufacturing and export sectors, and also, importantly, tourism, which is a huge industry in Australia. Americans now reject the idea of vacationing here because using their weak dollar, the prices seem outrageous here (and I don't blame them). 10 years ago the USD:AUD was more than DOUBLE what it is now. Combined with inflation this means that an American would be paying (in USD terms) almost triple what they would have in 2001 for the same Australian trip (except for airfares, which are presumably bought from an American airline and thus paid in USD).
OTOH the weak USD/strong AUD has made it very attractive for Australians to visit (and shop in) the US. Apparently Australians are now the one of the most common incoming passenger nationalities into California (impressive considering our small population). For shopping sprees worth over a few thousand, it's cheaper to fly to the US, buy everything, and fly back, than it is to shop locally, because the weak USD makes US prices look ridiculously cheap to us now (a decade ago they were roughly on-par).
Having said all that - the USD is unique, being the global reserve currency. While I would normally agree with you that "weak currencies ... don't inspire confidence in other countries to keep them", I think the USD is the exception to that rule. Being the reserve currency, there really is no choice but to keep USD. It's still (somehow, amazingly) seen as stable and risk free. Unlike say, when the AUD gets weak (it's strong now and a very popular currency to hold given that cash interest rates here are still 3+%, compared with close to zero elsewhere, but it will be abandoned in a split second as soon as there's a hint of weakness - it's still seen as risky despite our AAA credit rating etc...we just aren't a big or diverse enough economy)
It's not strictly "too much land, not enough people". Australia has the same huge amount of land and vastly fewer people to fill it, yet has on the whole better mass transit than the US. The difference is that the population is more centralised in Australia (more highly concentrated in the cities, rather than the eleventy billion small towns you get across the US).
So the 'problem' (I wouldn't call it a problem, just a difference in settlement patterns) with America is "lots of land, people more evenly scattered across it", rather than simply not enough people. In fact with well over 300M people and with birth rates higher than almost any other developed country, you may have an overpopulation problem in the not-too-distant future.
Hey, cool map.
Australia here - we pay more than the US but less than Europe. I don't mind it that way - gives me some incentive to save fuel where possible (which benefits everyone) and I know that the difference in price is primarily taxes, which go towards maintaining the roads. I've driven a lot in the US and Australia and from my experience the road infrastructure in cities is better maintained in Australia than in the US, but the reverse in rural/remote areas (a lot of rural highways in Australia are narrow and in pretty poor condition, mostly due to the ridiculously low population density/tax base in rural Australia compared to the US).
Ouch.
Australia is "as big" as the US (physical size, not population) and my phone plan is $20 a month. 1.5 GB of data and more voice time/SMS than I'll ever use. And national coverage of course (within the same country has never even been called 'roaming' here, it's always been completely normal and assumed that a phone/plan works the same anywhere in the country).
Having said that, that doesn't include a subsidized phone - I bought the phone outright because I hate contracts. So the cost of the phone is an additional be a $200-$800 one-off cost depending on what model of phone you get. Still over 2+ years, it works out way cheaper this way. Even our "free/subsidised phone and 2-year contract" plans are way less than $100 or $80 though. So I guess yeah, the US is expensive for phones.
That's OK though, you guys get almost everything ELSE cheaper than we do :) (Clothing, fuel, software/music/movies, etc.)
It's interesting that you mention the 'relatability' of units. I wonder if this, too, is purely a product of upbringing and experience. I can't relate at all to feet and pounds and inches etc. I grew up and still am completely metric (in Australia). And I simply have my own 'body part visualisations'. Pinky finger width as you mention is a cm. but my hand width at its widest point (fingers together) is exactly 10 cm. And a metre is a walking pace stride (much like a yard would be). So I have my 1/10/100 cm approximations and that's all you really need.
For weight and volume, I just think of a 1 litre soda bottle. That is 1 L but it also weighs 1 kg. Or 2 L / 2 kg for a 2 L bottle if that's easier. Oh and we still use cups for cooking in metric - it's actually 250 mL, but roughly fits in a cup or mug just like the old 'cups'.
Similarly for temperature, I think what 'sounds' right is a product of upbringing. Fahrenheit temps just sound so ridiculously huge to a Celsius-only brain. -20 is frigid (like 0 F, which is pretty close)' -10 is rather cold, 0 is freezing point, 10 is cool, 20 is room temp, 30 is hot, 40 is HOT (40 C acts like the de facto '100 F' in metric countries - the temp that the news will make a big deal about if it gets there).
Anyway, simply wanted to add a bit on the idea of 'relatability' of units from a purely metric brain. I think if you are brought up on ANY system, you will find ways to approximate it pretty well for day to day use.
It's not a matter of forcing, but seriously, the US is the last holdout. It's a pain for every industry that has to deal with the US, or US industries that have to deal with other places. It adds a layer of duplication or redundant effort to everything that needs to operate in the international market. That'd be fine if half the world was using one system and half the world the other. But it's just one last country, stubbornly holding on to their system for what at times seems no good reason other than just 'to be special'. The rest of us just want to consign traditional units to history and be done with it, but we can't while a major market like the US still uses them. I'd love to actually be able to print a document sent to me from America without having to go and change the paper size and deal with all the pagination issues that result. I'd love not having to change my ruler in MS Word from inches to cm every time I install it. And I'm sure programmers of all software would love not having to waste their time programming two sets of measurements into everything so it can be used in all markets.
Also, it's confusing for travellers (seriously, the US unit system baffles most visitors and results in American tourists overseas looking like idiots and loudly demanding to know what things are in their own units). A minor quibble perhaps but it does perpetuate a negative stereotype of Americans that doesn't do anyone any favours.
Don't get me wrong, I am no anti-American. Half my family (including my wife) is American and I enjoy spending time in your country. But everyone scratches their head at the lack of progress on metrication. Again, it's not that we want to force a change. Its just that the job, globally, is almost done, except for one last place. Drawing on the experience of every other country that has successfully changed, they should be able to do it easily and without major issues. But still don't, despite the benefits to the nation as a whole (note that as you say, there are few benefits in day to day personal life - the benefits are more societal and in industry). The conclusion in some people's mind therefore is that the US behaves this way just to piss everyone else off and be different.
Land gridded up like that using miles or some multiple of miles as a unit is common in Australia too, but they converted fully to metric in the 60s. The standard land parcel just becomes some number of hectares instead, of which there are 100 per square kilometre. It works fine.
The only time you get an inkling of the history behind this is when you realise while driving around "hey, these side roads seem to occur exactly every 1.6 km ... interesting".
The point I'm making is that every other country converted (almost ... there's a few weird holdouts like the UK still using miles for road distances) and didn't fall apart. And Australia is probably the most similar place to the US to use as a case study (both huge, both with Federal-State-local government system, both English speaking and with similar traditions of splitting up land etc, both with massive and often isolated highway systems with huge amounts of signage to change). No one is saying it's an utterly trouble free process, but really, it went pretty smoothly and any minor teething problems were sorted out long ago. My parents lived through the conversion and say it really wasn't a big deal at all.
To me, MMO implies a single, persistent world with many thousands of players. The 'massive' refers to the number of players, not the world size - Massively Multiplayer Online game.
Depends on the jurisdiction. Some states ban them outright. Others allow them on specific days in the year (which doesn't normally include New Years ... e.g. they were legal in the ACT on the Queen's Birthday weekend up until a couple of years ago, now I think they are banned outright there too - too many complaints from pet owners and people who had idiots blow up their mailbox with them etc.)
...is an MMO now?
But that aside, on New Years (which was yesterday here ... I'm in Australia) my wife and I went into the CBD of my city for the fireworks at 9pm, but didn't hang around until the midnight ones as the city events are all alcohol-free and we wanted our midnight champagne. Went home, opened a bottle at midnight, watched the other fireworks on TV. Boring but pleasant :)
Um, not even close. Voyager is currently just under 0.002 light years away. Two one-thousandths of a light year.
Which of course makes your point even more pertinent. 12 light years, or even 1 light year, may as well be infinity.
(When you said it was only 0.17 ly away I was like "what, seriously? That's actually pretty good!". Then I realised that can't be right, as I know the DSN isn't waiting anywhere near 0.17 years for signals from Voyager.)
Well, Australia at least has most definitely been overrun with McDonalds outlets... :)