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Comment by perilunar | Hacker News Reader

But metre is an SI base unit and people say "thousands of kilometres" instead of megametres.

I think they're just not well understood by most people. 1000Kg is a small car. 1Mg is...who the fuck knows. You can tell someone a building weighs 1Gg but they're gonna stare at you funny until you tell them it's about 1000 small cars.

OTOH, 1KHz has no basis in physical reality for normal people but they know 1KHz is 1000x faster than 1MHz so it works nicely for things like "is my new computer faster than my old computer" (at least a decade ago, I don't see clocks advertised much at all anymore).

...GHz ?

1 megagram is a ton, which is widely used. A lot of stuff is measured in tons, including cars (“this car weighs almost two tons, which is pretty heavy for a sports car”), cargo (20-ton train car), etc.

It stops on the ton, though - “40 thousand tons of grain” - gigagram isn’t used.

Isn't 1 megagram a tonne? A ton is a slightly larger non-SI unit.

Well of course if it doesn't get used then most people will not be familiar with it — that's the point. We should encourage the use so people become familiar with them, so we can stop using "thousands of" and "millions of".

Re kHz, I think most people understand frequencies we can hear. (1 kHz is close to a high C note). MHz and GHz are radio frequencies.

1KHz is faster than 1MHz? Our computers are getting slower and slower?

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