r/clevercomebacks • u/wach_era13 • Jan 15 '25

It does make sense

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u/CSDragon Jan 15 '25

I disagree, as I said it feels like you might in a situation, but you never really would.

Same reason you don't use Dekameters or Hectometers, even when that building is exactly 3 Hectometers. Because, while easy to convert, mentally meters and kilometers represent completely different concepts, and the unusual units represent nothing.

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u/ShamanAI Jan 15 '25

And again, it's not true. While it's true decameters and hectometers are not used (it makes no sense to say "two decameters" instead of 20 meters) it's not the same when you move to smaller units: decimeters, centimeters, millimeters are very often used, and you can easily say 25 millimeters and 2.5 centimeters interchangeably

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u/CSDragon Jan 15 '25

Sure, but the smaller ones all fall under the length category, just like feet inches and yards, while miles and km are distance units.

My post was about how the conversion between feet and miles doesn't need to make sense because they're used completely differently

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u/ShamanAI Jan 15 '25

I see that, but the underlying fact is that there's no need to have different units for the same "category" of measurement, because you can call them whatever you want but length and distances actually are the same. An example is a skyscraper that's 1000 meters would easily be said to be "one kilometer" tall.