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Comment by deaddodo | Hacker News Reader

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The Nazi genocide in the East was explicitly modeled on the treatment of Native Americans in the 19th century.

So, like voltage, it’s another case where Americans invented something and Europeans doubled down.

Yes, Americans invented populace relocation (and the abuses that come with it). Nice to know the Roman Empire had a time machine to pull a major component of their imperial edict from.

But let's pretend your warped view of history is reality...that happened 100 years earlier. If Europeans are so enlightened atop those tall horses, maybe don't do it again and 10x worse?

In addition, I wasn't referring to the Holocaust...but the entire continent's shared sick desire to kill themselves off for 10km of border movement or literal dreams of world conquest.

This wouldn't surprise me, but I can't find it. I'm seeing some authors drawing comparisons, but haven't found Hitler or his party actually mentioning Native Americans. There are explicit references to Turkey, with Hitler mentioning the Armenian Genocide (as justification for invading Poland) and calling Ataturk a "shining star," along with the Nazi papers obsessing over his nationalist policies.

yes, but who invented the americans

Interesting thing I learned, horses actually originated in the Americas. Some of them migrated to Asia, then the ones in the Americas died out before human civilization, so only the Old World civs had them. When Europeans brought horses to the Americas, they were bringing them back.

Ok I'm going to make this even darker: The metric system sucks for non-scientific usage, especially using Celsius for room or weather temps. Idk why Europeans (and other continents) insist on using something with such low granularity and weird usable ranges. 0F = prob not going outside, 100F = close to highest temp you'll see all year, 56C = highest outdoor temperature ever on Earth. In the 70s (F) = warmish weather, in the 60s = coolish weather, in the 20s (C) = either cool or hot. Digital thermostats add 0.5 increments if you set them to C mode, lol. Meanwhile KPH is too granular, while 0-100MPH is all you need for cars outside of racing. Divisibility into meters etc is pointless, cause it's not like I need to compare a road trip length to the height of a person.

No surprise that basing your units on the physical properties of water doesn't give you very human-friendly results. Their only good unit is kilograms/grams. Edit: actually not even that.

Meh, I don’t even thing grams are very good.

Pounds have a nice granularity for every day stuff: a 3 pound laptop and a 2 pound laptop are significantly different, but both are “about a kilo”.

On the other end, a gram is such a small amount that I can only perceive it in multiples, whereas I have a pretty good idea of how much an ounce is.

A laptop that's a pound and a half is also very different.

But oh, if you're willing to say "and a half" you might as well be willing to say .7 kilo.

There's no real overall advantage, you just picked a couple very specific numbers. You can always pick very specific numbers to make any system look better/worse.

I don't think I can perceive a half-pound difference, but half increments are still nicer than needing the whole range of decimals. If I have to say 0.7 anything in everyday life, then it's not a good unit.

Speaking of which, there's nothing stopping us from using something like SI prefixes with customary units, for example kilofeet. We just don't need to.

Actually yeah, I remember realizing the same thing a while back. 1 pound difference is about what I can perceive. Same with 1˚F difference.

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