44
Why do people who try to convince others to switch to metric focus so much on the conversions?
(herbicide.fallcounty.omg.lol)
this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026
44 points (70.8% liked)
Ask Lemmy
37232 readers
1881 users here now
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
These aren't nicknames, these are the standard names of US currency. Pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and half-dollars (not super common though)
Also if someone pulled out 26 coins to pay for a meal they'd also have a very annoyed cashier at minimum
The point of this was more "Coins are a pain in the ass regardless of whether we're dealing with 100 or 240 as the base"
They're nicknames for those (Similar to how people refer to bills by whatever president is printed on it), they might be very popular nicknames which grants them the "common name" descriptor, but the official names are the boring " cents coin". People outside of your country have no obligation to know how you nickname your coins.
Well, that might be true now because most counties only have 5 different coins, but pre-decinalized currency in the UK had 11 coins, it only got to 26 coins in my example because I included 7 of those (Sorry for farthing, pennies and Guinea fans out there), most of which in small numbers that someone might be carrying around in their pocket individually. And my point was precisely that, it's such a complex system that you end up with dozens of coins with random values trying to mix and match them to get to the amount you want.
But they're not, like you realized with 26 coins of 7 different values you didn't even get to a whole pound, with a decimal system the closest you can get is 1 50¢, 1 25¢, 1 10¢, 2 5¢, 4 1¢ which is 9 coins, and like you can see the vast majority is a single coin because 2 of them would get you to the next coin already.