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Comment by ep103 | Hacker News Reader

You're getting a lot of downvotes, but this is legitimately the first time I realized that a 1.5C temperature difference really means a 5 degree difference in Fahrenheit. I think it would genuinely help Americans if this were reported in the scale we were familiar with. A 5 degree F difference sounds far, far more scary than a 2.5 degree C difference.

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Or maybe it's time Americans start educating themselves on matters that pretty much everyone else in the world understands but them.

What do you think is more efficient? Some how convincing all Americans to learn the metric system to the point that they can intuit differences in temperature, or, explain it in a way they can understand it by simply using a different unit of measurement?

I mean, I agree with you, but trying to get the entirety of a country to educate themselves in time to do something about it is not really going to work.

Well, it really does say something about our hopes of doing something about it if we can't even get them to learn to multiply a number by 2 and add 30 (see, I'm being generous and rounding the numbers). Hell, let's make it even simpler. Just say "IN FAHRENHEIT IT'S MORE, WAY MORE."

Maybe if we call them "dollar degrees" and "euro degrees" we'll get their attention.

But seriously now, yes, I do think it would be a pretty good idea for Americans to learn the metric system and not just because of the issue at hand, and it shouldn't be that hard. Isn't it intuitive enough to remember "0 is for freezing and 100 is for boiling water"?

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