Lol every time I see the word "feet" I'm reminded that this article isn't targeted to anyone but Americans, even when talking about manufacturing lines in Asia. My East Asian bias is showing but in all my experience I absolutely have never had to use those units in a serious professional context. Any time I see a technically-sounding article use units like "feet" and "football fields" I subconsciously find it very difficult to take anything afterward seriously.
I admit it's irrational since units are arbitrary and orthogonal anyway, but it seems... forced. Is it really necessary to use those units in a technical context in order to relate to your readers?
EDIT:
Lots of America-centric people are jumping onto me for this initial comment, stating that WSJ is built for its /true/ target audience, /Americans/. What sparked my comment was the fact I was reading this article in Japanese. The aforementioned numbers and graph are expressed in feet, so this kind of forced conversion across industry domain and language barrier seemed contrived and got me started on this train of thought.
The difference between 185 million ft^2 and whatever you pick doesn't matter. It may as well be in hectares or "multiples of some lake somewhere", it's a massive number.
You have, and are probably using right now, a voice controlled computer that can convert anything to anything else, by just asking.
Is it really worth typing this every time an American site uses American language? We all get it, Americans with their imperial units, ha ha.
I think you might have missed that I already stated that it's an irrational thing to complain about because units in nature are arbitrary, but given that no one uses these units for the topic at hand, why use them at all? Just for relatability?
> It may as well be in hectares or "multiples of some lake somewhere", it's a massive number.
We're saying the same thing but arguing for the opposite. Like I said, no one in a technical capacity uses these units seriously. So then if the number is so conceptually massively big and the units don't matter, why go through the extra forced effort of converting to imperial? Just use the units that the specifications come in and the numbers that the factories use?
The more you play with vast unit conversions like this, the more you risk losing information across sources/citations. What if I want to do my own research later on? It's more work if I'm searching for specific numbers on Google. We also know just how terrible Google Search results are getting nowadays, so...
> We all get it, Americans with their imperial units, ha ha.
I think this is an uncharitable interpretation of my comment. I'm not trying to make fun of Americans, I'm trying to understand what the extra efort is worth for?
The WSJ didn't write this article for you, it isn't an industry rag. This is like complaining that their scientific articles try to dumb it down for a layman's depth.
A football field or soccer field is a perfectly reasonable unit of measure when you're simply trying to convey "a lot" to someone.
I don't particularly agree with the parent comment, but you are being oddly aggressive over something that is a real problem - communicating things is hard and it's a useful topic to consider in a world that increasingly runs on text-based communication.
Pedantically, at least a standard US football field is an exact size (120yds long, 53 1/3 yds wide).
Soccer pitches? Not so much ... FIFA states the field of play for international matches should be 100-110m long and 64-75m wide (tolerances are relaxed to 90-120m long by 45-90m wide - which oddly means you could have a square pitch). If one would like an example of a comically undersized pitch, look to NYFC playing at Yankee stadium - they had to get a special exemption from MLS, IIRC.
Still useful, though, and I think a reasonable person with familiarity with either soccer or football would get a rough idea.
Please don't take this as criticism ; it's not meant to be. The mention of football and soccer fields being used as a measure of size in the same sentence sparked recollection of some not-otherwise-useful knowledge stuck in my brain.
I don't think anyone uses them as exact units of measure but rather to communicate a size in relatable terms. When you relate scale to something familiar it elicits connotations from an individual's experience that makes things easier to comprehend.
Most people have seen a football or soccer field and understand the approximate size.
If everyone uses a different unit then it may not appear to be a lot at all. Nobody is measuring office space in football fields so how am I supposed to know how a football field sized manufacturing plant compares to an office building?
In general conversation, or general news articles people don't need exact units of measure because they're not acting upon that information. You use an approximation like football fields because it elicits a connotation and can help people easily grasp the scale.
> Quit being dishonest. You're not trying to understand because it's really fucking easy to understand.
Again, being very disingenuous. I'm sorry that it's so offensive to you that I was reading the article in Japanese and found it very strange that imperial units were leaking across not only domain topics (semiconductors), but language itself. If you ask me, it's more obtrusive this way than the other way around. I thought it wouldn't be too much of an ask to use the original units that the entire industry uses
This touts a certain kind of agenda that Americans should be pandered to, and I think your aggressive tone reflects that.
I hope you're aware that a very well-supported Japanese edition of The Wall Street Journal exists, and its target audience is Japanese readers. It usually handles localization extremely well. I was reading the non-English article and saw it was using imperial units both in the text and graphs and I had to do a double take. This is the entire reason why I found it interesting.
> Let's clarify. You're sorry that I find your insults offensive?
> You basically said "the American units of measure are unprofessional and I can't take anyone seriously when they use them" and you wonder why that might be offensive?
> Are you reading it for laughs then? I don't understand.
I tried to make it clear that I was describing my own experiences and biases, and I admitted that the units (when taken alone, by themselves) are arbitrary, and so it's irrational to harbor this subconscious, yet you still seem fully set on being offended rather than taking my descriptions at face value.
I think in the future your conversations could go better if you put less effort into deconstructing people's ulterior motives.
> It's ok to not like the Imperial system, most Americans hate it too. And we're stuck with it until momentum can built to change that fact. But what you're exhibiting is elitism and snobbery.
You did more than anyone to perpetuate this flamewar. That's seriously not cool, regardless of how badly someone else's comments were or you feel they were.
Thanks for taking the time to call out obvious casual prejudice, that you did it so articulately and humanly for someone retreating further and further into the facile impression of a robot speaks volumes.
> If you ask the vast majority of Americans how many centimeters are in a foot, you'll get blank stares. If you ask them how long 30 centimeters are you'll get blank stares.
The conventions of dealing mainly in centimeters and meters when discussing dimensions of human scale items could use fixing.
A simple solution is to promulgate the use of the "metric hand" (or just "hand" for short). 1 hand = 1 decimeter = 10 centimeters; about the width of a human hand. The decimeter has the nice property that it's approximately 4 inches, so there are roughly 3 hands in a foot—similar conversion conversion factor as going from feet to yards. Nice! Error accumulates at only 1.6mm (exactly 1.6mm) per hand.
(Equestrian sports already has a "hand" unit. Conveniently, it's defined as 4 inches, and its use is pretty much confined to those circles. There's not much need to distinguish between the two, therefore, but if ever a need arises, we can clarify whether we're talking about "metric hands" or "horse hands".)
> If you really truly want an answer, it's relatablity.
> If you ask the vast majority of Americans how many centimeters are in a foot, you'll get blank stares. If you ask them how long 30 centimeters are you'll get blank stares. If you ask them how long a foot is they'll hold up their hands about a foot apart.
> Americans use imperial units because it's what they used daily, what they're familiar with, and what they know. It's really not that hard to understand.
So I should print out one for everyone in America and pull it out with every conversation to reference it?
If America is going to switch to metric it is going to require a concerted effort to influence everyone, not flash cards.
They need to gradually phase it in. Since road signs last ~7 years they should pass legislation stating all new road signs must have kph under mph by 2029. Legislation to say by 2036 they must have kph on top with mph minimized underneath. By 2045 all must just display kph. Everything else much have a similar phased approach. By 2050, no more imperial.
Funny, because it's about 1700Ha, what is a perfectly relatable number, or, if you like your numbers small, 1.7km^2. That's around the size of a district.
> We all get it, Americans with their imperial units, ha ha.
It's really very tired.
Americans don't even use Imperial units. We use United States Customary Units [1] which are more like siblings to Imperial units than offspring.
United States customary units have been based on familiar Metric units since the Mendenhall Order in 1893.
School children in the United States have studied the metric system for generations.
The United States was one of the original 17 signatories of the Metre Convention in 1875. As far as I can tell no commonwealth countries were early adopters.
> United States customary units have been based on familiar Metric units since the Mendenhall Order in 1893.
No. They may be defined in terms of Metric units, but they aren't "based on" them. If they were based on them, they'd be a sensible integer (or decimal-factor) multiple of them, not some weird fractional measure. An inch being 25.4 millimeters may be the current definition of an inch, but that arbitrary length isn't based on anything in the metric world -- it's still just as based on the average length of the top joint of a medieval craftsman's thumb as it's always been.
No, there's nothing odd about the fact that units based on one set of measures become fractional when expressed in units of another measurement system. It just shows that neither is based on the other.
And of course "the fractional scale is not unique to US Customary Units", since there is no fractional scale within that measurement system. Nor within any other, AFAIK. Your pound consists of an integer number of ounces (right?) and your foot of twelve-point-zerozerozero... inches. The "fractional scale" exists only between measurement systems. (AFAIK. Except maybe old British currency, that was really weird, I'd trust those crazy Englanders to have about six Pi pennies to the shilling or something.)
https://frinklang.org/frinkdata/units.txt is one of the things i find myself reading and using to complain about things. Frink is a conversion tool and calculator, like "how many grains of rice worth of calories is needed to boil 1 liter of water" and even more esoteric stuff. It also can correctly convert between most of the esoteric units (rods, hogsheads, furlongs).
Frink has phone apps, so you don't need a data connection as you would with wolfram alpha or google.
Naah. It's defined in terms of the second, nowadays, but it's based on the circumference of the Earth: The meter was originally defined as one ten-millionth of the distance between the equator and the poles.
The United States does not use "Imperial" units. We use some Customary Units that are defined in terms of SI units and share names with some Imperial units.
The point is that saying "The United States uses Imperial Units" is, generously, ignorant.
yes - for example a US fluid Oz is different from everywhere else, as is a cup, a pint, a Venti (twenty what?) and many of the units used in cooking - using American recipes without translation can produce crap - Imperial fluid ounces are totally different largely due tax politics of the 1700/1800s
"185 million ft^2" and "185 million square feet" are two radically different numbers. One is a square 35 thousand miles on each side. The other is a square 2.6 miles each side.
Well, it is the Wall Street Journal. It shouldn't come as a surprise that an American publication named after an American landmark uses American units.
Americans, myself included, generally acknowledge that the metric system is better but we are already familiar with US units. There's nothing really wrong with US units either in terms of accurate measurement. In an ideal world we would use metric, but transitioning would come at monumental costs - never mind the re-training of an entire population - just so we can make unit conversions a tiny bit easier.
I get it. You're not familiar with US units like we are so you have to do conversions to make sense of the measurements - probably with a calculator since the ratios aren't simple, whole numbers. But remember Americans have to do the same whenever we read almost any foreign publication. Difference is I never see HN or Reddit comments complaining about metric units.
A meter seems to me linked to the human body just as much as the foot.
"The metre was originally defined in 1793 as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle"
That factor of ten is because we have ten fingers. There's no cosmic significance to ten or ten million. Or to the size of a line of longitude on our particular planet.
And a meter is almost exactly a yard, or three feet anyway.
The use of the decimal system is kind of funny because for the longest time large parts of Europe used a 20 based system for a lot of common math. You can still see this in French, where 99 is spelled out as "four times twenty and nineteen". Even in English you can find the remains of the 20-based system, because of the way numbers are expressed: twenty-one, but not tenny-one or even one-teen; twenty-five but not onety-five but fifteen.
The foot is directly based on a person's body part (which caused major issues when bordering jurisdictions used different sizes for a "foot"). The denomination used for meters is a lot more disconnected, its basis focused on the planet instead of on a body part. The choice for the decimal system is much more akin to the choice of 3/12/8/10 in the imperial system.
You can also quickly run into issues if you assume a meter is almost exactly a meter, there's a 9% difference there. The difference can quickly add up, and plenty of international orders have been messed up that way. The distances are similar enough that they serve the same use in day to day expressions, but they're certainly not "almost exactly" the same.
>its basis focused on the planet instead of on a body part
It was based on both, and both measurements are completely determined by the happenstance of life on earth rather than the laws of nature.
>which caused major issues when bordering jurisdictions used different sizes for a "foot"
The meter has also had varying definitions leading to slightly different values. Obviously if you are going to base it on the size of the earth there is going to be some uncertainty and of course that's not the current definition.
I'm not really trying to convince you or anybody that meters are not superior to yards, just that it's hard to explain why without appealing to prejudice and/or making categorical statements that are false.
>The choice for the decimal system is much more akin to the choice of 3/12/8/10 in the imperial system.
Is it correct to call SI the decimal system? Powers of ten time units never caught on above seconds.
I admit it's irrational since units are arbitrary and orthogonal anyway, but it seems... forced. Is it really necessary to use those units in a technical context in order to relate to your readers?
EDIT: Lots of America-centric people are jumping onto me for this initial comment, stating that WSJ is built for its /true/ target audience, /Americans/. What sparked my comment was the fact I was reading this article in Japanese. The aforementioned numbers and graph are expressed in feet, so this kind of forced conversion across industry domain and language barrier seemed contrived and got me started on this train of thought.
https://jp.wsj.com/articles/the-chip-shortage-has-made-a-sta...