Submitted by iamveryDerp t3_10m91c7 in todayilearned
Yes. Think about the present instead of the future. Foolproof method.
The only president to serve in Congress after his presidential term. He was a great lawyer, a great Secretary of State, a great Congressman, and a crappy president.
Answer these questions without looking them up:
Yeah we probably shoulda switched 😆
[deleted]
He took up gardening while serving as President, essentially because he was old school and believed the president should not be involved with legislation.
Yes. That and the fact that I’m in the middle of a JQA biography.
Freedom fractions FTW!!!!
Not sure about the first three, but everyone agrees in the 4th answer.
The President shouldn’t.
A pretty great person for the standards of his time as well. He was staunchly anti-slavery.
Answer these questions without looking them up:
No reason to switch. It works great and doesn’t need to change.
Asking questions that are only relevant in a specific circumstance means nothing.
How often do you need to know, off hand, how many feet are in an acre?
Heres the equivalent metric system questions:
I knew the answer to all of those and I live in the US. For the imperial system questions I only knew 2 off the top of my head.
Another fun fact there are 100 hectares in square kilometer. How any acres in a square mile? I have no fucken idea!
All that said I'm not saying we should switch. We already use metric for science and other necessary applications and hey imperial is kinda fun.
IIRC, he took no payment for the report. It was a passion project.
He did most of the research on his own time, which is one of the reasons it took so long, and he honestly thought it would be his literary legacy, which is why it was so unnecessarily detailed.
I mean he was the 6th president. Is he really “old school” if you can count the number of previous presidents on one hand?
When was the last time the answer to any of these questions were relevant to you?
Hard to say he was a crappy president because he was more famous for what he didn’t do. Serving at the close of the Era of Good Feelings, he is hailed as the original realist attempting to keep the peace. “[America] goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”
As a principal author of the Monroe doctrine, he was attempting to stay true to that document, and quietly stay in her hemisphere, so to speak.
He was also caught between two times. From the old school style he kept most of the previous cabinet appointments upon being elected, and therefore faced tremendous opposition within his own office, while simultaneously refusing to take part in the newer, populist, muck-raking style of politics being brought on by Andrew Jackson.
Someone put it best that he was a great man in the right place at the wrong time, or something like that.
Edit: I would agree, however, that in perspective of his career as a whole, the 4 years he was President were the most idle, ineffectual and boring years of his amazing life.
Not too often. But recently was wondering how many miles across my 80 acres of land is.
When buying real estate. Houses are measured in square feet, the land they're on in acres.
Compared to what A Jackson was bringing on, he was very old school at the time.
Forgot about the “damn the Supreme Court” president lol
2 is the only reasonable comparison (without converting between 2 systems instead of using 1. And even than, who cares except very specific scientists what temperature mercury freezes at.
Not too often. Last time was not long ago tho when I was wondering how many square miles my 80 acre woods is. And how far it was from one side to the other. The answer is actually a half mile since 40 acres is 1/4 mile square. So not too hard to remember but I didn't know at the time.
But that's why land is divided that way to begin with - 40 acres being 1/4 mile square.
John Quincy Adams you sly mofo.
I'd be the last person to change to metric, but I'd be lying if I said there is no reason switch. I work for a company in the USA that has gets a lot of materials from Canada and Europe. It'd also save me a few seconds every time I did some arithmetic and depending on my station, that might be a lot.
I agree there's no need to change. But there's also no need to remain. Personal inconvenience aside, i'm more in favor or changing that remaining.
The Imperial system is our underappreciated homage to our English cousins.
Haha. Nice work tho.
Colossal mistake.
Just shows that America has never brought their best and brightest to government.
3.5 years that's like 5 years in metric
Theres a ton of things your system should or shouldn't be doing. At this point the only way anything gets done is if the president does something along the way. Not including signing it, obviously.
So you buy real estate without doing any cursory research?
No, I'm giving a situation where converting in your head is useful. Say you see an ad for a 4000 sq ft house on 0.1 acre, being able to convert lets you know it's not worth the time to look at.
That's only 300 sq feet of yard to mow. Which is likely a small apartment building in the middle of a city. Something you'd know by you know, looking at it.
I specifically said off hand. Knowledge you need when you don't have a globally connected super computer in your pocket.
If you are a housebuyer and you cannot visualize what an acre looks like without doing math in your head...
[removed]
I mean what action could they have taken
Are US customary units and the imperial system not different? I’m pretty sure an imperial gallon for example is 10-20% larger than a US gallon.
Well this explains why the renewed push during the 1970s and 80s to adopt the metric system in the U.S. failed colossally. Somehow I became convinced as a child that understanding the metric system made me look clever, but that was before I realized most of the world had already adopted it.
It is a travesty that he and his father don't collectively merit an Adams Monument.
If you consider how deplorably the great leaders we honor sometimes behaved (Adams vs. Jefferson for instance), maybe boring was a good thing at times.
I can't visualize what an acre looks like because I don't know how much land a yoke of oxen pulling a wooden plough can plough in a single day.
Thinking for two seconds.
I mean, you can look at a few acre or half acre lots, which I'd assume a prospective homebuyer would, and have a pretty good idea of how big of a house you'd want to plop down on it.
Completely besides the point.
That’s not really equivalent. A kilometer isn’t equivalent to a mile. The equivalent would be how many feet in 1000ft. Surly you can answer that. Imperial is just as easy when you use the equivalent ratios. It really doesn’t matter which system you use in every day life.
In situations where you need to convert back and forth mentally a lot it’s easier, but that’s such a small portion of the time it’s negligible.
When do you need to know when water boils? Turn heat on high and wait. The temp water freezes is much more useful information and everyone knows that.
The rest are very equal comparisons.
Sure there are some reasons to switch. The US military uses metric since they operate where most of the prod uses it, and things like Subs use British pipe threads because it’s much easier to get parts overseas. A world standard would make that easier, but nobody really agrees on an absolute standard. Each area has its own perks.
The President has no real say on the matter. It takes a literal act of Congress, and there’s no reason for it so don’t expect them to work on it.
Daylight savings though, which also requires congress to act, should be rectified immediately.
It is incredible how incompetent an entire nation can be. Everyone else could do it but USA can't. It is amazing that no one has to bottlefeed them and change their nappies. "Nah, its too difficult, lets give up this not-at-all a hard thing". Nation of quitters.
Asks for an example and then does... this.
A lot of things are measured in inches but need to be converted to yards and miles. For ex, how many bolts you need for a span. The idea that you don't need to ever convert is just stupid and shows that the person has never had to work measuring anything.
This isn’t true though.
Spending a lot of one man’s time figuring out it would be too much effort ultimately saves everyone the hassle. A lot of government work involves researching, in painful detail, exactly how much of a ball-ache a change will be, and often the answer is “don’t do it”, so the government don’t do it. It’s time we’ll spent.
Why they got the President to do the research I have no idea!
You are really... asking about CONVERSIONS BETWEEN METRIC AND IMPERIAL as the "gotcha" when someone asks about conversions IN IMPERIAL ONLY.
To make it fair, use ONLY metric, just like the original question did with imperial.
Come on, you can't be that stupid, can you?
>A world standard would make that easier, but nobody really agrees on an absolute standard.
No, the world has agreed a century ago. USA does not want to do it cause it is apparently so hard. That is the ONLY reason given, "it is difficult and it sucks during the transition period" so they kick the can to the next generation. Every generation so far has been too selfish to take on the task. THAT IS THE TRUTH. Laziness, selfishness and incompetence.
> That’s not really equivalent.
Yes, they are. The questions above are the metric equivalents of what was asked for originally in customary units, you inexplicably asked a completely different, unrelated set that required mixed units. The point is that if you use metric you don't need customary at all.
Imperial is not just as easy, because someone unfamiliar to the system cannot make any assumptions about feet in a yard, or yards in a mile.
>The equivalent would be how many feet in 1000ft.
I think you are really close to grasping the point here - metric is better because each unit scales easily with the previous one. The relationship between a meter and a kilometre is obvious, that is not true of feet vs miles. A yard is to a mile as a metre is to a kilometre, except the latter is far more intuitive.
the last good president 🤧
itd just get removed or vandalised by antifa or minorities, so really why bother.
to be fair... the united states was meant to be a temporary entity till they got their shit figured out.
Oh look, a shitty opinion in the wild.
the american public school education, everyone!
[removed]
5280, 212 at sea level, 240, and 43560. Not hard if you remember that an acre is just a furlong by a chain.
There are 640 acres in a square mile
I mean if he had spent more then 18 months on it he might have come up with a better answer.
jackson destroyed the second bank of the united states, which was trying to turn the united states into the pseudo-monarchy that it is today.
Your failure to miss the point is no example of my intelligence.
Your failure to see the relevance is your own and the reason you can’t grasp such a simple concept is why you don’t understand why things have no real reason to change.
No country strictly uses metric. Each has their own quirks, and nobody really agrees on one absolute system. It’s all arbitrary, so it doesn’t really matter.
It’s not hard because it’s hard to understand, it’s hard because it’s expensive and has no real value in changing.
No. The original question is how many feet are in a mile. The equivalent would be how many meters in a mile. You can’t change the distance so make your argument sound right, leave the distance the same and try to support your argument. The argument fails.
You failed to grasp that. You were close though.
>No country strictly uses metric.
Looks around in his Finnish apartment...
Nope, everything is metric, unless it is imported from USA. I mean, i have a bunch of imperial tools.. because some things are imperial because of USA but otherwise... I can not figure out what isn't metric.
>And nobody really agrees on one absolute system. It’s all arbitrary, so it doesn’t really matter.
SI units. You really are one of the most ignorant muricans or you are trolling. And of fucking course it matters. It costs YOU money to NOT convert, and it actually cost US money because YOU don't want to change. Like i said, i have to have some tools twice, just because ONE country, 5% of the world does not change. UK has a mess too, that is an EXCEPTION.
>It’s not hard because it’s hard to understand, it’s hard because it’s expensive and has no real value in changing.
It cost you money every single day and you have to change one day. It is just that YOU don't want to do it because you are selfish and lazy. I remember this one dude talking about doing things because they are hard. Wonder where that fellow came from, which country's president said that.. You just do not want to because it is too hard for you, let the next generation deal with it.
The irony here is just.. keep going dude, you are being hilarious.
Hah, that’s actual lunacy. Andrew Jackson literally caused the panic of 1837 by ending the regulations the 2nd bank had.
Also, he kickstarted the trail of tears?
> The equivalent would be how many meters in a mile.
No, it wouldn't, because the entire argument is conversions within a system, not between systems. They aren't saying metric works better with customary, they are saying metric works better and so why use customary at all? This isn't hard to grasp - a yard is to a mile and a meter is to a kilometre - you don't mix them. The metric system means you don't need to know metres in a mile, because you wouldn't ever think or measure in terms of miles (you'd use kilometres). For instance, it is not a weakness of customary that miles do not have a clear relationship with hectares - they are separate systems not intended to be used together - the weakness is instead that miles have no clear relationship with acres.
Are you being deliberately disingenuous? Surely you understand miles have no place in the metric system, so you don't need to convert to them?
That's not equivalent at all.
[deleted]
> Andrew Jackson literally caused the panic of 1837 by ending the regulations the 2nd bank had.
this line of reasoning could be used very ably to justify keeping actual dictators in power, im pretty sure it having absolutely no congressional oversight and its supporters in congress electing to keep it that way was what cause the panic, not the guy getting rid of it.
> Also, he kickstarted the trail of tears?
Nice job!
I'm curious how knowing the acre/furlong relationship helps with knowing square feet per acre? Is it just that you have memorized there are 43,5602 square feet in a furlong and divide by 10?
I actually find imperial units and stuff fun and interesting. Recently I was doing some personal land surveying and re-learning the relationship between acreage and square miles. Such as forty acres being equivalent to a quarter mile square.
Interesting and explains why large parcels of land often consist of multiples of 40.
Yup! thanks, I actually realized I prob knew this one too as I've been delving into learning about acreage and such lately. Fun stuff.
A mile is an arbitrary distance we agreed to call a mile. It’s the exact same distance no matter what method of measurement you are using. So, if you use metric to measure that distance, it doesn’t help you at all. In day to day life being able to convert within a system really doesn’t matter, and even more so today when you can do it on your phone in seconds or via Alexa or the like.
How many feet (standard small imperial unit of length) are in a mile (standard large imperial unit of length)?
The equivalent question using metric units would use two standard metric units of length ( i.e. meters and kilometers).
You're a fuckin buffoon
The times that the imperial system has actually most annoyed me in life was when cooking certain things (fermentations for example) and having to deal with how many teaspoons in a 1/4 cup or how many cups in a gallon, etc. It wasn't too bad, but had to re-familiarize with conversions.
You are either profoundly stupid, or trolling.
The point is that you wouldn't ever refer to miles. You would refer to kilometres. Being able to convert within a system is useful all the time, don't be ridiculous.
>That’s not really equivalent. A kilometer isn’t equivalent to a mile.
There is no way a person can be this stupid to not understand why what they said is the equivalent of the original statement, if you're not trolling I feel fucking terrible for you.
I'm pretty sure it was just an elaborate prank by the Van Buren Boys to keep JQA occupied with hundreds of frivolous correspondences about what can and can not be measured with the metric system.
A furlong is 1/8th of a mile and a chain is 66 feet. So it's just a matter of doing a bit of multiplication. Chain is a super useful measure because most surveying measures are whole multiples of a chain.
The biggest hangup most metric people have with imperial units is conversion factors but once you learn those it's not difficult to use them. My favorite example is tea spoons in a gallon. Yeah it's not immediately intuitive but it's not difficult to figure out if you actually needed to know for some reason. Four quarts to the gallon, four cups to the quart, sixteen tablespoons to the cup, three teaspoons to the tablespoon. Just do a bit of simple multiplication and you're done.
Interesting. Yeah totally. I recall having to do such calculations when fermenting stuff like hot sauce and kombucha.
Like you said it's not bad once you are familiar with the converssions. And some math would also have to be done if one was cooking in metric - but those calculations would likely just be a little simpler and quicker.
You don’t need to refer to it as a mile, you only need to know how many meters are in it, which you don’t, thus proving knowing how many feet are in a mile really isn’t necessary in most applications.
The system obviously was confusing to him if it took him 3.5 years.
I agree it becomes pretty easy to visualize once you have an idea of what a half acre or acre looks like.
But when you want to actually do the math, for example figuring out how long the driveway will be if putting a 50x50 shed on a half acre plot. It's not as simple as it could be.
I recently relearned stuff like how wide a forty acre square plot of land is (1/4 mile). I have an 80 acre property that is 1/2 mile x 1/4 mile. Interesting to know.
No say yes, but sway he does have. As long as R have congress nothing gets done. D have it little gets done, half the reason is that not enough D have a seat, the other half is money.
You really don’t understand politics at all, do you? None of what you said is true in the slightest.
> Absolutely the second worst Adams we’ve ever had as President!
-Thomas Jefferson
One year=10 months One month= 10 weeks One week=10 days One day=100 hours One hour=100 minutes One minute=100 seconds
Did I do it right?
That's not a surprising find for you. You see one every time you look in the mirror
That’s kind of ironic because I would think that changing to metric when the nation is young would be WAY easier than doing it later. Even doing now would arguably not be that big of a deal but I can’t imagine it would have been “too difficult” when the nation was, like, 15 states.
Umm, what US have you been watching? It's run by money, has been for a while, plenty of US oligarchs. The R whine and complain about the deficit when not in power, but run it up when they gain control, stonewall if they can any progress, so they can say the goverment doesn't work and then regulatory capture any agency they can, so they can privatize it and get kickbacks.
The democrats don't follow lock and step, so when they do get in control, very little gets done. Not to mention they are also all getting rich off insider information just like the R. Some of them care, one man in particular, but most of them just pay lip service. Not to mention all the gerrymandering that's fucking legal in the US.
The President doesn't have control over what laws get passed, yes, that is what I have said. But he can come out publicly for or against something. Influencing public opinion. He can also talk privately with senators and make deals, he obviously can wield power over what happens in the house and senate, but he certainly doesn't control either. Especially with more and more wackos being elected to the house.
Or do you think the United States of America has made a lot of progress in the last few decades? You're a fool if you do. It's one or two elections away from a dictatorship.
Actually it does have value in changing. Even in my job alone we'd actually save a considerable amount of time and money using metric.
Well, with your expanded explanation we agree more, but I do disagree that the Dems get anything done. They surely pretend to, then it silently goes away or gets completely dismantled because it’s unreasonable.
Then use metric. Nothing is stopping you if that’s true.
What's stopping us is half of our materials are not in metric.
The President should be lobbying lawmakers to do things for the American people who elected him/her.
Yeah they ignored his paper on why not to switch, but they still didn’t switch?
What CANT I measure?
[removed]
Yes, the US standardized on its own system before the British empire. Though there were some efforts made to standardize between both later on, most notably the "industrial inch" which was an agreement between US and UK during WW2 to standardize on a metric based inch (2.54 cm exactly).
The one guy you say cares, does his first name start with a B?
Yes it does.
Your worldview is fucked and your linked source is pathetic. Go defend genocide somewhere else.
[removed]
sysadminbj t1_j61nunb wrote
Literally everyone that contracts for the federal government should bow to the master of wasting time and money.
Well played, JQA.