It's 2017 and I still can't believe that...

[freebrickproductions]

...people still believe that the moon landing was a hoax, and/or that the Earth is flat.

[inkyatari]

...people still believe that the moon landing was a hoax, and/or that the Earth is flat.

Or people who believe that clouds are made of chemicals.

Don't even get me started on conspirisheep.  #CAKU

[SP Cook]

From the above.

- Cars as "appliancemobiles" .  Nah.  I see this idea a lot on racing BBs trying to explain NASCAR's decline (easy to explain: Brian France) but there are younger "car people" and there are exciting cars being made.  It is a version of false memory, because you remember the cars that stood out when you were about 18, forgetting all the plain cars of the same era.  So will today's 18 year olds in 39 years.

- DMV.  Name something the governemnt does well.  The thing that befudles me are people that want governement to be in charge of their health care. 

- Credit cards.  Their very existance is what I cannot believe.   Not that long ago, stores had credit cards, but the general accepted everywhere card was just for the upper middle class, mostly trabelers.

- Metric.  The USA will never adopt the metric system because the American system is just so much better.  Metric was invented in the French revolution and while the units work out by 10 and all of that, they have no basis.  American's system was developed out of people's needs.  The units reflect things people can do or need.  A pint is about the right amount of beer.  The weather is going to be in the low 70s means something.  A mile is about how far a good athlete can run without pacing himself.  An acre is the amount of land one needs to own.  So on.  Metric is just random meaningless numbers.  Good for scientists, meaningless for people.

- Circumsion.  There were these protestors in town last summer.  Men, and some women, wearing white pants with blood stains and big signs.  Apparently this is what they do, rather than, well, work for a living.  Travel the country.  With all of society's problems, this is a pretty strange issue to devote one's life to worrying about.

The things that most befuddles me is the scientific illiteracy of so many people who have received a good basic western education. 

[hotdogPi]

...people still believe that the moon landing was a hoax, and/or that the Earth is flat.

Or people who believe that clouds are made of chemicals.

Don't even get me started on conspirisheep.  #CAKU

Yes they are. Is there anything tangible that isn't made of chemicals?

[inkyatari]

...people still believe that the moon landing was a hoax, and/or that the Earth is flat.

Or people who believe that clouds are made of chemicals.

Don't even get me started on conspirisheep.  #CAKU

Yes they are. Is there anything tangible that isn't made of chemicals?

Oh, I know exactly what you mean, but I'm talking about the chemtrail lunatics.

[english si]

So what section of the constitution would be so grossly violated by universal HC? I'm pretty sure "universal healthcare shall never be a law of the land" isn't in there.

Now that's being obtuse of course, but explain it to me.

The 10th amendment makes it clear - the federal government has no power got given to it by the constitution. Healthcare is not one of these powers.

State governments can do universal healthcare, but the federal government can't. The AHCA, for all it's many many faults (not that the GOP is offering anything better), does rather well at skirting those issues and won the cases in the Supreme Court based on 10th amendment claims - less so on the 1st amendment suits against it. The feds can 'tax' (to use the word Chief Justice Roberts pulled out of nowhere to allow the feds to fine with crippling fines those who don't comply) people who don't have healthcare.

[Rothman]

Name something the Government does well:

We waited for the private sector to step up and improve our road system for decades to no avail.  Without government, the U.S. Interstate Highway System would have taken longer to come into fruition.

[formulanone]

Name something the governemnt does well.  The thing that befudles me are people that want governement to be in charge of their health care.

From experience, the private sector seems to provide a lazy job of handling insurance claims, to the point defrauding clients by charging for remainders it failed to recoup due to missed deadlines. No accountability; I understand that running a practice is far from easy on top of being a dedicated professional, but billing standards aren't rocket science. Either you have insurance (or not), look it up, find out if it is / or not / partially-covered, to what extent, and how much you split it all by. Instead of taking a few minutes to give a final or expected cost, they'll just "bill you later", only to find out that some odd or secondary procedure isn't covered. There's expensive software to figure that all out to the high-school educated folks at the front desk.

I think that's the galling thing about healthcare: no other industries can get away with flat-out lies, malpractice, inflated bills, kick around claims endlessly, provide endless legalese, and red tape like they can...except federal and/or state government. They're perfect for the job.

[Scott5114]

- Metric.  The USA will never adopt the metric system because the American system is just so much better.  Metric was invented in the French revolution and while the units work out by 10 and all of that, they have no basis.  American's system was developed out of people's needs.  The units reflect things people can do or need.  A pint is about the right amount of beer.  The weather is going to be in the low 70s means something.  A mile is about how far a good athlete can run without pacing himself.  An acre is the amount of land one needs to own.  So on.  Metric is just random meaningless numbers.  Good for scientists, meaningless for people.

But if I don't drink beer, a pint is meaningless to me. My parents owned an acre of land that I grew up on and it was unwieldy; way too much grass to mow, and that much land here in the city would be expensive as all hell, so I own far less than that. The acre is useless to me.

I do drink soda, though, so I know exactly how much 2 liters is.

[freebrickproductions]

...people still believe that the moon landing was a hoax, and/or that the Earth is flat.

Or people who believe that clouds are made of chemicals.

Don't even get me started on conspirisheep.  #CAKU

Oh yea, I completely forgot about "chemtrails". I wonder if the "lizard people" conspiracy was actually started as a joke that the conspiracy nuts took seriously.

SM-G900V

[TheHighwayMan3561]

I'm sorry but that really pisses me off that you see people suffering and dying as "sorry, its against our laws and that's more important to me."

[GaryV]

- Metric.  The USA will never adopt the metric system because the American system is just so much better.  Metric was invented in the French revolution and while the units work out by 10 and all of that, they have no basis.  American's system was developed out of people's needs.  The units reflect things people can do or need.  A pint is about the right amount of beer.  The weather is going to be in the low 70s means something.  A mile is about how far a good athlete can run without pacing himself.  An acre is the amount of land one needs to own.  So on.  Metric is just random meaningless numbers.  Good for scientists, meaningless for people.

Actually the metric system WAS based on something concrete.

The meter is some power of 10 fraction of the distance from the equator to the north pole (not some arbitrary scales like the length of some king's arm or thumb).  (Of course they got that distance slightly wrong, but ...)  A hectare (land measurement) is 10000 square meters (not like an acre which was the amount of land a team could plow in a day, or something like that).  Weights were based on the weight of a cubic centimeter of water.  Calories are how much energy it takes to heat up that cc of water (what is a BTU based on?).  Every unit is somehow linked to other units.

And if you were brought up with the system, you would begin to think in metric.  One big reason the US never went metric was the way it was presented to us in school.  Instead of measuring in and thinking in metric, we were taught how to multiply and divide to convert pounds to kilos or meters to feet.  Dreary.

[The Nature Boy]

So what section of the constitution would be so grossly violated by universal HC? I'm pretty sure "universal healthcare shall never be a law of the land" isn't in there.

Now that's being obtuse of course, but explain it to me.

The 10th amendment makes it clear - the federal government has no power got given to it by the constitution. Healthcare is not one of these powers.

State governments can do universal healthcare, but the federal government can't. The AHCA, for all it's many many faults (not that the GOP is offering anything better), does rather well at skirting those issues and won the cases in the Supreme Court based on 10th amendment claims - less so on the 1st amendment suits against it. The feds can 'tax' (to use the word Chief Justice Roberts pulled out of nowhere to allow the feds to fine with crippling fines those who don't comply) people who don't have healthcare.

With all due respect, this is just false.

Nothing in the Constitution prohibits the United States government from using its spending power to create a national healthcare system. Read the rest of the Constitution, the government has an unambiguous authority to tax and spend.

No court in the country is going to find a national health care system unconstitutional.

[vdeane]

Yeah, that's a big part of the problem.  America's approach to metric conversion is/wasn't "change the units that are used" so much as "continue to use the same units, and convert before starting or finishing every single task".  I imagine a task like doubling a recipe would be approached by first converting milliliters to teaspoons, multiplying the number of teaspoons by 2, and then converting back to milliliters.

- DMV.  Name something the governemnt does well.  The thing that befudles me are people that want governement to be in charge of their health care.

I've never received anything less than good service at the less busy locations (such as in a rural area, or a mobile satellite office).  I imagine the main problem is understaffing.

- Metric.  The USA will never adopt the metric system because the American system is just so much better.  Metric was invented in the French revolution and while the units work out by 10 and all of that, they have no basis.  American's system was developed out of people's needs.  The units reflect things people can do or need.  A pint is about the right amount of beer.  The weather is going to be in the low 70s means something.  A mile is about how far a good athlete can run without pacing himself.  An acre is the amount of land one needs to own.  So on.  Metric is just random meaningless numbers.  Good for scientists, meaningless for people.

Are the units really so fitted for how we live our lives, or have we fitted our lives to the units because we like nice, round numbers?  Is a pint really the right amount of beer, or is it the amount you're used to because it's the most conveniently sized container for our measuring system?

- Circumsion.  There were these protestors in town last summer.  Men, and some women, wearing white pants with blood stains and big signs.  Apparently this is what they do, rather than, well, work for a living.  Travel the country.  With all of society's problems, this is a pretty strange issue to devote one's life to worrying about.

Well, there is this thing called "time off".  At least, there is at my job.  And the fact that society has big problems doesn't mean that we should ignore smaller ones.

[noelbotevera]

3. Is this a personal fetish of yours?

Just a cultural thing. Here in Europe circumcisions aren't done just because, they usually have a medical justification. I even consider this genital mutilation. So no "hygienic" crap (While that is somewhat true, I decided to pee with the foreskin back for the same reason), and Europe is mostly Christian. Anyway, this is unrelated to what I proposed once in the "Threads you'll never see on aaroads.com" thread (I only wrote something that surely won't happen here).

I asked my mom about our little history concerning this topic, so most of it is (paraphrased) from what she said.

My family formerly lived in the Philippines, and my older brother was never circumcised at birth. She said "Alright, he looks good, no need to be circumcised.", and everything was fine and dandy up until he was 3 or 4 years old. Now normally, families taught their children to pee with the foreskin back (just like you), but my brother had issues in where he couldn't pee because the foreskin closed. So he was circumcised, and when I was born (which was an accident) my mom took precautions and decided to circumcise me to avoid a repeat.

So yeah, I'm part of the crowd, but it's not hygienic crap this time around.

[english si]

With all due respect, this is just false.

Nothing in the Constitution prohibits the United States government from using its spending power to create a national healthcare system. Read the rest of the Constitution, the government has an unambiguous authority to tax and spend.

With all due respect, read what I've been saying - that spending powers allow the federal government to encourage state governments to sign up to something that they themselves cannot do.

No court in the country is going to find a national health care system unconstitutional.

A specific system, sure, however there's a very narrow band of operation. That the 10th amendment cases against Obamacare were heard all the way up the court chain shows that there clearly is a constitutional tightrope - if it was clear cut, then the cases wouldn't be picked up by appeal courts and the lower courts' judgements sustained.

And that's ignoring the 1st amendment cases against the AHCA that won in the Supreme Court - it was unconstitutional in places (and if not repealed soon, will see other cases against it on these grounds).

[english si]

Actually the metric system WAS based on something concrete.

The meter is some power of 10 fraction of the distance from the equator to the north pole (not some arbitrary scales like the length of some king's arm or thumb).

The massive difference is that the north pole to equator via Paris is a deliberately non-visualisable concept (and as you point out they couldn't even calculate it properly at the time because it was so divorced from reality). Dimensions of regal body parts at least could be compared to things close to hand - people, on average, have nearly 2 arms and nearly 2 feet, and nearly 2 thumbs that are at least reasonably correct. Yes, sure, the king was a big bloke, but someone was needed to be used as a standard for what people have been doing since the dawn of time in using body parts to measure stuff.

When I want to measure, I use a measuring device. When I want to estimate/visualise, I don't. Unless it is a metre where I imagine a metre rule - because that's how abstract it is - we have to have these sticks that are the right length to enable us to comprehend how big a metre actually is, rather than having them just to make sure we get an accurate measure.

The Metric system was made deliberately aloof from the mundane. It was never meant to be practical - it was meant to be calculable. The British experience, whereby we measure things precisely in metric, but most of us estimate in imperial (and convert stuff into imperial to get a better grasp of its size) shows that.

A hectare (land measurement) is 10000 square meters

I was taught almost entirely in metric growing up, and I was in my late 20s when I knew that and only because I finally got fed up of not having a clue what one was (I still don't really, though I can grasp m^2, km^2 and acres). It's a hect- (a prefix only really used for this that means x10^2) 'are' (a made up term for 100m^2). The reason that these unhelpfully named units exist is because metric needs these psudeo-customary measures because it's deliberately abstract and not designed to give good numbers. BTW - I was about 11 when I could deal with acres (including conversion to m^2).

See also the common French thing of buying "un livre de jambon" (a 500g 'pound' of ham) - a kilo is too much, and cinque cent or demi-kilo is a bit of a mouthful, so they often call it a pound.

The reason customary has odd multipliers is because it wasn't designed as a system, but was a variety of different units, created for different tasks, smooshed together to make a system. You don't need to know that there's 660 feet in a furlong, or 1760 yards in a mile because you will be using one or the other and have little need to convert.

(not like an acre which was the amount of land a team could plow in a day, or something like that).

A task orientated unit and thus tells you useful information about how long it would take to plough. A hectare exists because a sq km is too big for the task and a m^2 too small and they wanted a less clunky name for a hecto-square decametre (you could also call it a square hectometre, but that's not the etymology), so they made up the name 'are' for a square decametre and added the almost never used prefix for 100. See also, with far more success, the litre, which is a cubic decimetre.

Weights were based on the weight of a cubic centimeter of water.

No they aren't - weights are based on accelerating an object of the mass of 1000 cubic centimetres of water at the rate of 1 metre per second per second.

Masses are based on the mass of a cubic centimetre of water. Neither is useful information most of the time - I guess it's handy to know that a litre of water weighs the same as a kilogram (ie 9.81 Newtons) for stuff, but that's as far as the usefulness goes.

Calories are how much energy it takes to heat up that cc of water.

Calories are one of those psuedo-customary measures. For years I thought it was imperial, because nutritional information would have kJ and kcal on it under energy. The conversion factor is 4.184, and all food intake talk is in kcal rather than kilojoules because the numbers sound better (same reason that the UK went from describing weather with near exclusive use of Fahrenheit to dual units with preference for C in winter and F in summer to near exclusive use of Celsius without any pressure over the course of 30-40 years - the numbers sound better). Though, when it comes to heating water itself, a task where calories would be perfect, we use kJ/s (ie kilowatts) to describe the capability of such devices.

Also note that it's a kcal - that's because the numbers are more the right scale rather than having tons of zeros - a big problem with the metric system is that the original centimetre-gram system was terrible and, despite the move to metre-kilogram there's a lot of artifacts of the old system.

(what is a BTU based on?)

the amount of heat needed to raise a pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit. If you think that's dumb, it's no worse than a kcal being a kilo of water and Celsius. Neither are of any real use!

Every unit is somehow linked to other units.

Which is something that we don't particularly need. There are some uses and you typically have to bring in multipliers anyway, like the ~4.2 heat capacity of water. The whole thing about this being amazing is a mountain out of a molehill.

And if you were brought up with the system, you would begin to think in metric.

I was brought up with metric. At best I'm bilingual (I'm certainly fluent in both systems), though instinctively I think in imperial.

[hotdogPi]

It seems like millimeters and grams are used for very small values, even in the United States.

Examples include pencil "lead" thicknesses (usually 0.7mm, but 0.5 and 0.9 also exist), and nutrition labels showing 2g fat, 10g sugar, etc.

[formulanone]

It seems like millimeters and grams are used for very small values, even in the United States.

Examples include pencil "lead" thicknesses (usually 0.7mm, but 0.5 and 0.9 also exist), and nutrition labels showing 2g fat, 10g sugar, etc.

Medicine and medical sciences are almost exclusively metric, even in the US, as are many nutritional standards. As for tiny objects/quantities, it's probably because things like "grain" and "dram" have almost no basis outside of the medicinal world in the past half-decade, so the average person has no use for the measurement. Ounces and Inches are kind of assumed to be the smallest measurements of weight and length in the public's mind. But go to an import automobile shop, and speaking about millimeters (with the exception of wheels, tires, and lug nuts) isn't so unusual.

I think folks are also usually crappy at understanding fractions other than quarters and halves, and maybe eighths...ask most people whether 9/64ths is greater or less than 7/32nds, and you'll probably get a blank stare at first, which is also a really good reason to move to metric.

[GaryV]

It seems like millimeters and grams are used for very small values, even in the United States.

Examples include pencil "lead" thicknesses (usually 0.7mm, but 0.5 and 0.9 also exist), and nutrition labels showing 2g fat, 10g sugar, etc.

And then we have the mixed up measurements used by EPA, simply because they give a more pleasing number.  Vehicle emissions are measured in grams per mile.

[inkyatari]

It's 2017 and I still can't believe that...

...adam sandler is still allowed to make movies.

[tribar]

It's 2017 and I still can't believe that...

...adam sandler is still allowed to make movies.

Sandler will be allowed to make movies as long as the people continue to pay to watch his crap. Same thing with Michael Bay.

[formulanone]

It's 2017 and I still can't believe that...

...adam sandler is still allowed to make movies.

Sandler will be allowed to make movies as long as the people continue to pay to watch his crap. Same thing with Michael Bay.

Translate into other languages, distribute, wait six months = profit. The theory is that if 10% of the world is impressed by explosions and fart jokes, there's still money to be made.

That's a big reason why a lot of really average and sub-par movies get made, but it's fair to say not everyone is trying to make the next Godfather nor Citizen Kane.

[Roadgeekteen]

It seems like millimeters and grams are used for very small values, even in the United States.

Examples include pencil "lead" thicknesses (usually 0.7mm, but 0.5 and 0.9 also exist), and nutrition labels showing 2g fat, 10g sugar, etc.

Who cares about lead thickness?

[Max Rockatansky]

It seems like millimeters and grams are used for very small values, even in the United States.

Examples include pencil "lead" thicknesses (usually 0.7mm, but 0.5 and 0.9 also exist), and nutrition labels showing 2g fat, 10g sugar, etc.

Who cares about lead thickness?

Test reading machines can only read certain thickness of lead.