If only there was a simple way to find out.

I’m not sure I agree that we have problematic debt or affordability issues — at least not ones that artificially constraining the money supply would solve.

There are short-term cost price inflation problems like the cost of eggs due to an avian cull after a bird flu outbreak. That’s not a problem caused by printing money.

Ditto oil shocks. An affordability crisis unrelated to money supply.

Then we get to long-term affordability problems like housing. Housing is expensive due to policies that constrain new construction (NIMBYs) like parking requirements, supposed environmental concerns (on dense urban infill construction?) and the like.

But what makes housing really expensive is the financialization of homeownership. 100 years ago, if you took a loan on a house, the term was typically five years. The concept of a mortgage then was more like the concept of a title loan today. There’s remnants of this idea today in the game Monopoly — you buy a home cash, and if you run out of cash you mortgage the property — get some quick cash but sign the income over to the bank until you pay off the mortgage.

Now with 30 year loans, you’re really just renting your house and the bank is the landlord. But the 30 year loans jacks up the sale price which benefits the seller, the realtor, the broker, the city/state/whatever that collects property tax and the bank that actually owns the home until you pay it off.

Again, not a problem of money supply.

I’d challenge anyone who thinks the gold standard is a solution to read any book on modern monetary theory (MMT) and tell me they still think so after. Stephanie Kelton is a great MMT theorist.

In a nutshell, MMT says that the only constraint on a fiat currency issuer’s ability to print money is their tolerance for inflation. Which I don’t think gold bugs would like but would be forced to agree with.

Glad we agree. 😄

How does tying the world’s economic productivity to the amount of shiny rocks currently unearthed help anything? There were constant financial panics under the gold standard.

I’ll do the same if you can convert 2.34 days into seconds in your head. Now!

You use non-base 10 units all the time. You’re weirdly quiet on that point.

Didn’t know you were a baker. 🙄

Unless you give me a reason for converting miles to inches outside of a lab, you haven’t shown what you say you’ve shown.

I can demand you do a bunch of time conversions in your head and pretend your inability to do so means we should switch to metric time. But that would be silly.

I took an astronomy course in college (in America). Want to guess what system we used? It wasn’t inches.

Though even astronomy uses AU, which isn’t an even base-10 multiple of meters but a useful human-scale (or solar system-scale) measurement.

Feet aren’t a measure of volume or weight.

But feel free to stick your feet in flour and let me know how it goes.

Also, what cookbook specifies fractions of kilograms of flour? Unless you’re running a bakery, the conversion isn’t useful.

I presume you use an electric kettle, then?

So you have it boil water by specifying the number of Joules to use? Or kilocalories?

What even is this line of reasoning? Outside of a lab, I don’t need to know the amount of energy used to boil water. That’s the point. It’s boiling when it boils.

And 100°C isn’t even the boiling point of water at altitude. It’s a totally arbitrary scale, not very useful in day-to-day situations.

Do you really need to know the number of inches from Los Angeles to Portland outside of a lab? Seems unlikely.

That’s the point. In a lab, where conversions and formulas are frequently used, metric makes sense. I use it all the time. Even the US military uses metric for their specifications.

Outside the lab, it makes little sense.

I don’t believe you. Any time you’re looking at an apartment or house and don’t have a floorplan or a 10’+ tape measure, you walk the length of each side of a room side heel-and-toe to get a rough idea. The deviation of the length of your foot from 12 inches isn’t material in this situation.

And if you’re really struggling with this, a room with a 10’ side would be about ten small steps across, a bit more than three strides.

I know intuitively how long my foot is and how long my stride is. I don’t know intuitively what the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of ⁠1/299792458⁠ of a second, where the second is defined by a hyperfine transition frequency of caesium.

So what if someone is standing back trying to communicate with you how much to raise it so it looks good?

“Raise it by the length of the last segment of your thumb!” You’ve just re-invented the inch. Congrats.

“Raise it by 2.54cm!” Wow, great units that are easy to eyeball without a ruler. Based on a subdivision of the great circle of the earth going through Paris (of all places). Definitiely not arbitrary and very useful in everyday situations.

A mole is a very useful unit of measurement in chemistry, but much less so in baking.

How many moles of flour are you putting into your bread dough?

You don’t need a ruler to measure a foot. It’s right there in the name.

And if the variability of people’s feet is too much for a particular situation, then yeah, use metric.

But I can visualize a room’s dimension in feet. You may be able to visualize it given meters, but that’s come from experience, not intuition.

And if your argument boils down to “who cares about arbitrary scales” then you’re going to have to explain what’s wrong with adding decimals to miles.

I conceded, in the post you responded to, that metric is better for science. It’s the last sentence in my post.

Do you struggle with reading comprehension?

I mean, it is consistent, compared to itself. If I have a framed artwork held on the wall by two nails and want to raise it roughly an inch, my thumb is right there to measure with. No need to get a ruler.

The fact that there’s no easy conversion between my thumb and the speed of light in a vacuum just isn’t a problem I deal with on a daily basis.

It’s good enough for an estimate of the size of a room, which is what it’s commonly used for.

‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’

This is a question I’ve never once heard asked outside of a chemistry lab. Which is where metric units are useful.

These supposed facts are also not true except with distilled water, at sea level, etc. etc. Water doesn’t freeze at 0°C, it requires activation energy. And any impurity will lower its freezing point. Plenty of ocean water at well below 0°C, as well as fresh water at very high pressures.

A bottle of wine is 750ml (or 75cl) and a pint (i.e. a normal glass) is 0.4731765L. Very intuitive.

What’s the efficiency of an ICE motor in metric? L/100 km? Great that it can be converted into other units, but it’s existence an admission that it’s not a useful human-centric measurement. Just like air temperature. When I switch my car to metric, the thermostat has to add a digit and increment in half degrees to give you what Fahrenheit gives you without a third digit. The external air temperature requires a sign in metric.

Also, which US state did Dr. Fahrenheit hail from? I’ll give you one guess.

But hey, decimalization is great, right? So why don’t you use metric time? Come on, throw away a lifetime of knowledge and compatibility with others because it can be converted easier in your head.

It’s defined as 1/12 of a foot and your wife said my inch was the best she’d ever had.

You guys must boil water differently than I do. I put water in a kettle on the stove on high and take it off when it boils.